#when did ship dynamics become so important in fandom. this is ridiculous

[lai-mar]

You know, I really appreciate that you’re out here defending this widely hated relationship. Maybe it’s because the anime-only fans are a very vocal majority right now, but I’ve seen people who ‘watched the anime then read the manga’ *still* shit on Laios and Marcille’s friendship. Like you don’t have to ship it but if you deny that they care about each other or deny that they have chemistry, did you even read the comic?? ‘Oh they’re just siblings/siblings-in-law!’ have you ever had a sibling. have you ever had a sibling-in-law. they do not act like siblings they act like *intimate* best friends. ‘Ridiculously comfortable around each other’ best friends. They have a relationship outside of Falin, that is what develops over the entire damn story. 90 chapters. What comic were you reading where you think Marcille can barely stand him.

Thanks for the ask! Very cathartic to see this. About to go on another rant again lol (will be repeating some of my old points but yeah I need to get it out of my system)

"Defending widely hated relationship" + "anime-only fans are a very vocal majority"

Okay, let me play devil's advocate for a second here. Let's say I despise L/M as a ship and it squicks me out greatly and I think it's a boring ship of pairing the male lead and the female lead. What should I do? Obviously go into L/M posts and argue about it instead of blocking the tag and stating my stance my calmly when someone asks me like your average fan who knows how to curate their fandom experience.

Okay, more devil's advocating. I despise L/M as a ship but I have read the manga and engaged with it critically and understood its themes. Which means I like L+M as a friendship in the same way I like the themes of eating and life cycle and the friendship between the party and the worldbuilding. Because all of these are core parts of the story told. So what I do is to block all shippers and ship tag and look for platonic fics and fanart like Your Average Fan Who Curates Their Experience.

Like I'm sorry. I genuinely feel some people are so caught up in the intense fanonisation of DM that they start forgetting about canon. And I KNOW I am not the only one feeling this way because I read the notes on my posts and other people's posts and there's a lot of good thoughts on this. Plenty of people appreciate them. But to some people in the wider fandom, are we reading the same manga? Our male lead and female lead are friends who save each other. They are not together canonically. So canonically, they don't even get into the way of shipping?????? People can have important intimate friendships outside of romance??? And it's a canon well established friendship? I would say it's one of the most well developed dynamics in the series that we see? We get shown and not told? We see images and words and interpret them in our brains?

Devil's advocate level 3. Let's say mainstream fanonisation of DM is real. F/M is a canon ship and they get together and they get married in the end and L+M become sibling in laws. Maybe L/K is a thing. This still does not erase the entire journey L+M and co went on to save Falin. This still does not erase their friendship and chemistry.

"‘Oh they’re just siblings/siblings-in-law!’ have you ever had a sibling. have you ever had a sibling-in-law."

Okay. I do have a sibling. At this point I've long accepted this much be some sort of cultural difference and some weird American / Western thing I am not used to. And the hilarious thing about DM is that we do get canon siblings!!! It's the fucking premise! Falin and Laios!! And they're fun!

I'm sorry but this must be some cultural difference. Like no younger sibling is calling their older sibling by their GIVEN NAME. The sheer disrespect. I'll be scandalised. As a person with a sibling I don't understand the fandomisation of making non related people siblings in fanon? I'm calling my friends my friends, not siblings. My sibling is like a sibling to me. My friends are like friends to me. Idk. I've written the word sibling so many times that it doesn't seem like a word anymore.

Obviously these are just my personal thoughts but I feel like objectively, there has been a fandomwide trend of grabbing a canon friendship between a man and a woman and going "THEY ARE SO SIBLINGS CORE XD" (not siblings in canon) (not related) (don't even look similar) (they're friends). A lot of times this is valid and even fun but sometimes I get the feeling people sometimes push the fanon sibling thing to show they're squicky about them romantically. To which I can only say: a man and a woman can genuinely only be friends. If you need to magically make them related so you / other people won't see their friendship romantically... it feels like a step back. Why are we doing heteronormativity.

I think I'm the type of person who enjoys and mains man + woman friendships in fandoms (which are, unsurprisingly, unpopular as ships and even as friendships until I start spreading propaganda and pumping fics on Ao3), and I think one of the things that get me is. A man who could be attracted to women + a woman who could be attracted to men having great chemistry but staying friends. I want to stress this is different from a man who is not interested in women / romance + a woman who is not interested in men / romance because there is almost zero chance of a reciprocal romantic relationship going on. But for the first case, which I feel like many people dumb down to "straight people shipping", it's even more precious for them to stay friends and not give into the heternormative expectations despite one or both of them possibly (but not necessarily) being heterosexual. Like, here are two people who could date each other but they're like "nah we work better as friends, so we stay friends". To me, this is one fantastic argument for friendship. Not everything has to be romantic. Even better if they considered and thought about the logistics, but decide their relationship is more special non romantically. Having a taste of how their relationship could go and going "thanks, but no thanks". Is this not a great display of sincere and stable friendship compared to people going "lol they can't work as a ship because they simply physically cannot tolerate the thought of each other romantically". I'm rambling here but I feel like this is what I feel across various dynamics and fandoms. At this point, I think somehow non romantic relationships genuinely fascinate me more than ships. Save me QPR save me.

"They have a relationship outside of Falin"

I feel like some manga readers have missed the point so badly when it comes to this. It's hilarious. They have a relationship outside of Falin it's the whole fucking point about coming to terms with grief and death! You know, one of the core themes of this story that you finished!

And of course this doesn't erase the love they have for Falin. Falin is clearly beloved and their main motivation, but hilariously enough (for the L+M deniers), the manga shows Laios and Marcille's "true" innermost desires being granted and it's not about reviving Falin even though they both clearly want her back and it's at the forefront of their minds. Laios turns into a monster. His curse isn't about Falin not coming back (even though that was his immediate thought), it's about him not being able to interact with monsters ever again. Marcille was traumatised by what happened to Falin (nightmare chapter) but when she turns into a dungeon lord, she goes about trying to fix the lifespans, showing her fear of loneliness and all her loved ones (NOT just a single person!!!!!!!!) dying before her. You can argue they didn't revive Falin with magic lord powers because they don't trust the lion / trust their own plan of eating her, but I think the manga focuses enough on their desires for the interpretation of "the lion fulfills their innermost desires that define their existence" to work. Marcille is the one who finds Laios first after he turned back and Laios broke Marcille free from the lion's influence etc etc we know they play a part in each other's arcs. Laios says they wouldn't be on this journey if Falin hadn't been digested. Marcille says in the end she was okay with Falin not being brought back this time. Laios invites Marcille to stay with him. It's in the text.

"Boring straight ship" or whatever

This comes from what a friend said about my main duo of another fandom but it's like "why isn't [ship] more popular" "because it's easy to fall into the boring trope of pairing a man and a woman together".

And this is a thing that does happen! But not to pairings with strong canon foundation and chemistry sorry. Don't look at me, look at canon. A male/female ship with good canon support is a good ship. Why are you surprised. People like shipping characters who spend lots of time together saving each other and all that. Dare I say: sometimes (sometimes) shipping "straight people" is more respectful to their canon friendship than shoehorning them as siblings. Which I believe is true in the case of L+M.

Anyways. Well that was a nice angry rant. Sorry I had to get it out of my system. I've spend too much time writing this so I won't be doing much proofreading lol. If you've reached this point, thanks for reading <3

[mish-tique]

I am that anon and I've spent so much time thinking about the overlaps between kpop and f1. Not necessarily in a bad way because there's nothing wrong with enjoying either but both fandoms and industries have some drawbacks that are extremely similar. The "fan wars" thing and this attitude of fans thinking they're somehow superior because of the group or driver they stan, or even the gatekeeping attitude of trying to keep new fans out because they know more about this thing because they stanned this driver or group first. There's also this weird focus on looks in both to where it almost makes it seem like talent doesn't even matter anymore. I feel like this is glaringly obvious in kpop fandom and even if you watch idol survival shows and see extremely talented singers and rappers eliminated or judged on the basis of not having the right look. But it's been growing in the f1 fandom too. I have even seen large numbers of people agree that Max has no place in f1 because he's not hot enough to be marketable. That has nothing to do with driving a car, and a multi time world champion is going to attract tons of sponsorships so I'm pretty sure driving is more important there too. It also isn't as obvious with every idol group or driver, but there are some unhealthy body image standards and just discussions around weight in both fandoms and industries that make me v uncomfortable. This is a lot lighter than other topics too, but I also feel like neither fandom can let mistakes and things that don't matter in the long run go without bringing it up over and over again? I don't mean this in like a "this person said something problematic" but more in reference to their actual jobs. I've seen loads of ridiculous fan wars where kpop fans will share a video of the ONE time an extremely talented vocalist's voice cracked on stage, to try to assert that vocalist isn't talented. It very much gives off the same vibes as like people mentioning Sochi with Lando, or people mentioning how Max crashed a lot when he first joined F1, you get the idea. Clearly it would become a problem in either industry if it was becoming a repeated behavior, but this standard both are held to where if you make a single mistake, people write you off and claim you're untalented for your entire career is kind of weird and puts even more pressure in already high-pressure environments. It's not necessarily f1 directly, but I also think there's a pretty strong case to be made about the investments that go into idol training and f1 feeder series. Huge monetary investments, sometimes leaving their family and friends behind for years, very very little chance for most of making it in either if they're honest, more talent flooding the markets of both than really there is room for. There's also the same thing with like "big companies" giving their groups a much higher chance of success versus small companies that is very similar to the whole top team / midfield or backmarker team dynamic in f1. Like 9 times out of 10 the success either are able to achieve depends mostly on the contract they sign. Also, and probably most obvious, the FAN SERVICE. And don't get me wrong, I love a good wholesome hug when an idol or driver is going through it or maybe even happy and celebrating. I don't necessarily like these seemingly forced for PR "bromances," and I know a lot of people liked it, but I found things like the crowd yelling to Lando and Daniel to kiss on that one fan stage kind of creepy? Like I wouldn't care if they DID want to kiss, don't get me wrong, there's just something weird about fans demanding they do it. Its almost to where people can't separate like RPF from reality at times. It gives off the same vibes as people shipping idols until they basically start avoiding each other to avoid dating rumors. I don't even know how long this is getting, but I'm sure it's like a novel, so I will stop there but yeah. Many thoughts. 😅

HELP anon i must say that i was a little scared when i first saw this in my inbox dkghsdgsd. but don't worry!!

I used to be a kpop fan from 2015ish to 2019ish (? lines def aren't clear) and got "officially" into f1 early 2021 so for me it's more of a flow from one to the other and getting a lot of deja vu moments.

The "fan wars" thing and this attitude of fans thinking they're somehow superior because of the group or driver they stan, or even the gatekeeping attitude of trying to keep new fans out because they know more about this thing because they stanned this driver or group first.

Please, the fanwar flashbacks i keep getting is exhausting. And then especially when I think back about the solo stans vs other solo stans or the group stans vs solo stans.

Back then it would be baekhyun stans vs chanyeol stans (excuse me, I forgot the name for the solo fandom sdkhgsd. I can remember that exols used to be eris but that's about it!) and nowadays it's chirlies vs carlos fans, and what used to be exols vs armys because red bull fans vs Mercedes fans.

There's also this weird focus on looks in both to where it almost makes it seem like talent doesn't even matter anymore. I feel like this is glaringly obvious in kpop fandom and even if you watch idol survival shows and see extremely talented singers and rappers eliminated or judged on the basis of not having the right look.

Oh. My. God. The visuals!! The discussions there used to be within group fandoms over who was the main visual, who had no right being a rapper/singer/dancer simply because they relied on their visuals and the discussions about visuals in itself was. Something.

But it's been growing in the f1 fandom too. I have even seen large numbers of people agree that Max has no place in f1 because he's not hot enough to be marketable. That has nothing to do with driving a car, and a multi time world champion is going to attract tons of sponsorships so I'm pretty sure driving is more important there too.

I feel like some part of the f1 fandom is letting some off track factors play too much into the on track expectations and facts. Just because a driver is the next pretty it boy doesn't mean he will automatically do well, and just because someone isn't conventionally pretty doesn't mean he shouldn't have a place in a team... You can definitely enjoy a drivers looks or aesthetic but some have seemed to forgotten that their actions on track speak for themselves.

It also isn't as obvious with every idol group or driver, but there are some unhealthy body image standards and just discussions around weight in both fandoms and industries that make me v uncomfortable.

The reactions to Max during winter break but general body pictures are crazy. In both the kpop and f1 fandom fans seem to have some kind of image in their head of what "healthy" should look like and they fucking riot when reality doesn't match it.

Clearly it would become a problem in either industry if it was becoming a repeated behavior, but this standard both are held to where if you make a single mistake, people write you off and claim you're untalented for your entire career is kind of weird and puts even more pressure in already high-pressure environments.

You're totally right here anon, but it also weirds me out at times because like, in the end for both fandoms it counts that these people are fans and 90% of the time do not know all the facts or just can't look at it objectively. Both fandoms desperately need people to step back, take a breath and remember it's either a sport or music. ffs.

(...) but I also think there's a pretty strong case to be made about the investments that go into idol training and f1 feeder series. Huge monetary investments, sometimes leaving their family and friends behind for years, very very little chance for most of making it in either if they're honest, more talent flooding the markets of both than really there is room for. There's also the same thing with like "big companies" giving their groups a much higher chance of success versus small companies that is very similar to the whole top team / midfield or backmarker team dynamic in f1. Like 9 times out of 10 the success either are able to achieve depends mostly on the contract they sign.

The way being a red bull junior or a Ferrari academy driver is so alike to being an SM/YG trainee. They offer the best training, but also have the most new drivers/trainees vying for their attention. And let's be real, feeder series are totally the pd101 of f1.

Also, and probably most obvious, the FAN SERVICE. (....) I don't necessarily like these seemingly forced for PR "bromances," and I know a lot of people liked it, but I found things like the crowd yelling to Lando and Daniel to kiss on that one fan stage kind of creepy? (...) there's just something weird about fans demanding they do it.

THEY DID WHAT NOW??? But yes, that gives the same energy as fans demanding idols to do kisses etc on vlive/youtube lives. It's creepy as fuck and it makes fans seem like they truly think they can demand the craziest things from "their" idols/drivers.

Its almost to where people can't separate like RPF from reality at times. It gives off the same vibes as people shipping idols until they basically start avoiding each other to avoid dating rumors. I don't even know how long this is getting, but I'm sure it's like a novel, so I will stop there but yeah. Many thoughts. 😅

My only blessing is that while drivers seem to be aware of the "joke" romances, is that they seem less aware of RPF. (We are going to exclude that time where people close to max started reading my 4433 for fun and just could NOT shut their fucking mouth).

Which is kind of wild to me, because while kpop fans did talk a lot about rpf on twitter they also censorred a lot of stuff as like, ch*nyeol instead of chanyeol ( i guess the mv0 instead of mv1 of f1 only then less negative and more for safety), and some idols were aware of it, it was mostly ignored and looked away. You made sure you followed the right people so you were either surrounded by camp anti rpf or camp rpf.

With f1 rpf it's very much more containted to tumble and ao3, except lately i have seen a trend where people have become less afraid of mentioning actual rpf on twitter. Which scares me a little because drivers feel more active on twitter skdghds.

Yet at the same time ship names seem much more common knowledge and also accepted within the whole fandom (i.e. lestappen gets used by "bros" on reddit as emotional support rivals but also by ao3 writers.). So in f1 the line between "joking" implied shipping/rpf and actual shipping/rpf seems way thinner than in kpop, where back when i was there, you either used certain names or you absolutely Did Not Even Think About it.

Fuck I remember days where baekhyun fans would talk about chanyeol in a positive way and would censor chanyeol's name just to prevent chanbaek shippers from interacting.

Anyways thank you so much for your message and your interesting insight in your view on it!

I was about to say that i'll share my twitter thread about this topic on this page but i realized i got pics of myself on there so help me That Is Not Happening.

[luciferspit]

People who care about the dynamic of a ship are so fucking weird to me. "I love the ship with Bakugo and Deku but only when Bakugo is the top!! If Deku is not on the bottom I'll send you hate mail because I know this fictional character would never top!" holy shit who cares?? How in the hell is this so important to some people?

Edit: ayyy this blog is 1000% pro-ship and is run by an adult :) I just find this particular 'discourse' ridiculous.

[humanwheatleyslefttoenail]

why do you ship chell and glados if glados is basically her mom

Okay this is actually a pretty common misconception in the fandom that unfortunately a lot of people have taken as canon, but I’m feeling nice so I’ll answer your question.

Basically, anon is referencing a theory from around 2012 that Caroline is Chell’s mom. The evidence for the theory is as follows:

- The turret opera calls Chell “bambina”, which means “little girl” in Italian

- Chell’s name can be found on a Bring Your Daughter To Work Day science project

- GLaDOS references the possibility of Chell being adopted multiple times

- GLaDOS is significantly nicer to Chell after discovering she’s Caroline 

And, anon, you’re right, it does sound like a pretty good argument at first glance. The problem is that a lot of these points don’t actually hold up to scrutiny.

For example, although “bambina” literally translates to “little girl,” it’s often used in the same way “baby girl” is used in English - it can mean child, but contextually it’s usually a flirtatious term. (Source: Cambridge Dictionary)

For Chell’s science project, it doesn’t work as evidence for the theory because GLaDOS killed the scientists around 1998-ish, when Caroline had presumably been uploaded several years earlier and Cave was already dead. Also, Chell’s in her 20′s, and since we know from Lab Rat/Portal 2 that people don’t age in stasis, and that Doug put Chell at the top of the test subject list only weeks after the takeover, Chell was 28 at the time of the takeover. The science project is really only an Easter egg and doesn’t actually fit into the canon timeline let alone prove anything about Caroline and Cave. 

GLaDOS talking about Chell being adopted is a pretty strong point, I’ll admit, but also it’s important to remember that maybe half of what GLaDOS says is true. And even if we take what she says at face value, she also says there’s a man and a woman in stasis with Chell’s last name, which could not have been Cave and Caroline because they were already dead at that point. And the official book Final Hours Of Portal 2 confirms Cave and Caroline were not married and could not have shared the same name anyway. It was also the 50′s, an an unmarried couple of two likely famous people having a child would’ve been scandalous, and yet we see no hint of something like this affecting their company. 

Also, although GLaDOS is nicer to Chell after the Caroline reveal, that’s not necessarily indicative of a mother-daughter relationship, and neither is any of their interactions. It’s just. GLaDOS being friendlier. 

Finally, when this theory was made (and let’s be honest - it still is happening) Chell was constantly whitewashed to hell and back. 

Chell is Japanese-Brazilian, and Cave and Caroline are white, so it would be a near impossibility for her to be their biological child (and insisting otherwise is kinda. just. whitewashing). And although people will cry “adoption!”, based on what I’ve previously proven, that’s pretty much impossible. This theory that somehow she’s Cave and Caroline’s daughter erases an important part of her identity. [Disclaimer, I am white, but this is what I’ve heard from around the fandom]

With all that said, the idea that she’s the daughter of Cave and Caroline really doesn’t hold weight when you really analyze the canon. It’s surface level analysis that doesn’t hold up. And honestly? The idea kinda cheapens the story. It’s much more powerful that GLaDOS learns to care about Chell and becomes kinder than just. Oh, she remembered she’s related to Chell. 

But to actually answer your ask. 

Why do I ship them?

Well, they aren’t mother and daughter, I think that’s pretty obvious now. But if you actually look at a lot of subtext in Portal 2, without the lens of the mother theory, it’s actually pretty romantic! 

I know that sounds ridiculous, but bear with me!

Now - it’s totally okay if you don’t ship them. I get it. Their interactions in Portal 1 and the first half of Portal 2 are toxic if not outright well. Y’know. Murderous. I completely understand why that turns people off from shipping them, and ultimately, shipping is a personal thing. To each his own. 

But before you judge me, let me present my case.

Exhibit A: Portal 

Portal is kinda gay. No, really. Chell and GLaDOS are enemies in this game, but the entire focus is on their relationship (good or not) and the power struggle between them. They are opposites, two sides of the same coin, different representations of opposite ideologies. People have analyzed Portal as a relationship metaphor, or as a metaphor about women’s role in society - either way, the heart of Portal is the complicated dynamic between Chell and GLaDOS. 

That’s not necessarily enough to code a romance, but a lot of popular (and especially popular queer ones) ships begin with opposite ideologies, symbolic powers colliding. Portal cements their relationship as a toxic one, something on the verge of falling apart and hurting both parties in the end. The ending image, of Chell and GLaDOS side by side after the battle, reinforces the symbolic parallels between the two. 

The companion cube is also pretty symbolically important to this interpretation. It’s literally a representation of someone’s heart, and you are told to protect it and preserve it under GLaDOS’ orders, and then you have to destroy it regardless of how you actually feel about doing that. You are destroying GLaDOS’ heart, so to speak. 

There’s also the ending song, Still Alive. The lyrics speak for themselves.

They hint that GLaDOS’ feelings about Chell are more complicated than they may appear (if she’s not being sarcastic...) and she literally talks about Chell breaking her heart (also, think back to the companion cube. Yeah.). The entire song is structurally similar to many a breakup number, with the laments of “I’m glad it happened, but also leave.” 

At the end, we also see that the long promised cake GLaDOS was supposedly lying about was real the whole time. Before Portal 2 came out, it was mostly interpreted as a stinger ending (along with the nicer lyrics of Still Alive) to make you question GLaDOS’ true motives and intentions.

She actually did have a real cake waiting for you. (Side note - not really evidence, but in Argentina, “torta” means cake in Spanish. It’s also a slang term for lesbians. So. Do with that what you will). The cake is what GLaDOS offers you to lull you into the sense that she cares about you, so discovering that “the cake is a lie” wakes you up to the realization that she doesn’t. Except then the idea is subverted one last time, at the very end, showing that the cake is real and at least some of what she said she meant. 

You also see the companion cube. You know, GLaDOS’ symbolic heart?

Now, okay, you might be thinking I’m extrapolating a bit too much. And you might be right. But Portal is not the only game in the series, and if you’re asking me about Cave and Caroline you obviously know about Portal 2.

Exhibit B: Portal 2

If you thought Portal was gay, Portal 2 turns that up to 11.

Even before GLaDOS wakes up, you’re treated to some visual subtext. A few of Rattmann’s drawings representing the events of Portal 2 focus a lot on the relationship between GLaDOS and Chell, with more of the cake symbolism.

In this, you can see a face layered on top of GLaDOS. This could be foreshadowing about Caroline, and likely is, but also resembles his other drawing of Chell. It insists that Chell is a part of GLaDOS, or reinforces parallels between Chell and Caroline, hinting at something either way. 

In this picture, we also see Chell standing on top of GLaDOS, in the same position where the overlay of the feminine face was, again referencing the parallel. It also presents them as opposites, fundamental parts of the same thing and both connected to the same basis, but on opposing sides. 

When GLaDOS wakes up, she returns to her antagonistic role, but there are more hints to something deeper just like in Portal. 

Here, in her awakening lines, she references Chell not unlike an estranged ex. Also worth noting that GLaDOS is pretty much the personification of testing (in a sense, she is testing since she can control all of Aperture like an extension of her body), and insinuates that Chell loves to test. And that she reciprocates that feeling.

In test chamber 10, she says this:

It’s supposed to be threatening, but it does read as almost... sentimental. 

There’s also another chamber with companion cubes in Portal 2. I already talked about their symbolism in Portal, and the same pretty much applies to them here. However, GLaDOS says something interesting about them during this level:

Once again, meant to be intimidating, ends up coming off as “well, GLaDOS, why were you going to give Chell a heart shaped representation of yourself that says ‘I love you?’” And you might think I’m stretching the GLaDOS’ heart metaphor thing a little far here, and I might agree, if the companion cubes didn’t literally sing Cara Mia for you. 

Cara Mia is the turret opera from the end of the game, which is all about how much GLaDOS cares about Chell. More on that later. But the companion cubes play a song called Love as A Construct, and when you get close to them, they sing a specific part of the song that has the tune of Cara Mia. These things literally exist to sing about GLaDOS’ feelings. 

Which makes this line a lot more. For lack of a better term. Tsundere-ish.

Then, right before the escape, she starts talking about the confetti from her fake surprise. 

I really don’t have to explain this one. What else does GLaDOS consider an inconvenience but might miss anyway? Or, more aptly, who else?

Then, during the escape, she teases a (fake) final test chamber in front of you, and forms the panels in the shape of a heart. No, really. 

Up to this point, a lot of the points I’ve presented are interspersed with a fair amount of antagonization on GLaDOS’ behalf, more Foe Yay than anything actually hinting at something deeper than GLaDOS being conflicted about whether she loves or hates Chell. But things really ramp up after Wheatley’s betrayal, when the two of them are forced to team up. (I should also note here that “enemies to lovers” is a pretty classic queer romance trope.)

Here, GLaDOS is put on an equal level with Chell and they have to rely on each other if they want to survive. For the rest of the singleplayer campaign, GLaDOS becomes a lot nicer and even friendly to Chell. There comes a point where she starts referring to Chell as a teammate, calling them “we.” She begins to consider them one unit, two opposites unified. Here’s what she says after the lemon rant:

You can not only see her using we, but actively talking about how her and Chell are going to fight Wheatley together. There’s also that last line - “let’s explode with some dignity.” GLaDOS has fully accepted the very likely possibility that she and Chell might die together. That she might die on the same level, and the same team as Chell. And she seems... surprisingly okay with that, as long as she and Chell go together. 

It’s during the Old Aperture levels that Chell and GLaDOS also discover that they have a lot in common. This is the part of the game where GLaDOS figures out she’s Caroline, that she’s human. Or, that she’s like Chell. And Chell discovers (from what we can tell anyway) that Caroline is kind, that she’s funny and smart and so many of these things she never noticed about GLaDOS before. Now also with the knowledge she is fighting alongside another human being. 

You can also draw parallels between Chell and Caroline, both intelligent women ultimately betrayed by their seemingly innocuous male friends before being trapped in Aperture and forced to team up with one another in a way that will free both of them. We see that really, GLaDOS isn’t that different from Chell - she too has been imprisoned in this place against her will, but in a completely different way. Once again, the idea of two sides of the same coin applies here. 

I’ve written another meta about this before, but I also think the whole idea of repressing a part of your identity and hating it, before bonding with another woman and then realizing that it’s okay to be like her and to be on her side. It’s okay to be yourself and meeting her is what helps you discover this new part of yourself. Is kinda inherently gay. GLaDOS’ discovery of her own humanity just fits so well into a queer realization narrative, to me at least.

Then, Chell and GLaDOS escape Old Aperture and have to get through Wheatley’s tests. 

Here, GLaDOS isn’t just begrudgingly on Chell’s team. She’s actively helpful. She wants to help Chell solve tests, defends her from Wheatley’s insults, and makes jokes to lighten the mood. Things that can really only be explained by her caring about Chell, especially the part about the insults. See below.

After the two escape Wheatley’s testing track, right before the boss fight GLaDOS has a few other things to say.

GLaDOS is not going to betray Chell, because of some kind of conscience. But she could easily ignore that back in her body, and yet? Here she’s deciding not to, and for no good reason. She didn’t have to say that to Chell, but she did, because she cares and she wants Chell to live.

And then, moments before the fight:

The final lines imply that GLaDOS does not think of Chell as an enemy anymore, and that it doesn’t matter what Chell thinks because they are in this together and they are getting revenge together. It’s pretty heartwarming to be honest, to know that even in a fight that will almost certainly kill you, she is there rooting for you and caring about you, even if you don’t feel the same way about her. It no longer matters to GLaDOS whether you even reciprocate - you staying alive, you making it through is enough for her.

So Chell fights Wheatley and sends him into space, all well and good, and at this point, GLaDOS has the option to kill Chell. But not only does she not, she actively saves Chell, and holds her hand in the process. If you don’t believe me:

And not only that, but when Chell goes unconscious from her injuries, GLaDOS sits and waits for her to wake up. It’s also implied that GLaDOS carries her to the elevator, since it’s where she wakes up but not where she passed out. In the scene where Chell blacks out, you can also hear the part of Love As A Construct that sounds like Cara Mia. Yeah. Yeah.

If you think that this cannot possibly get any gayer, you are wrong again, because then GLaDOS makes her final speech. Which is really just a love confession, let’s be honest.

The “surge of emotion?” Do you mean love, GLaDOS? And the idea of GLaDOS considering Chell her best friend, despite everything these two have done to each other? The idea that GLaDOS, out of all people, forgives someone?

Except this isn’t even Chell’s final send-off. GLaDOS writes her an entire opera of turrets, that sing a literal love song. (Note what I said earlier about the use of the word “bambina”).

It really can’t get any more obvious than that. “My (affectionate romantic term here), my dear, I adore you.” How. Is. That. Heterosexual. In. Any. Way.

So Chell goes to the surface, set free by GLaDOS (think of the saying “if you love something, set it free), and you think that’s the end. Until GLaDOS gives you a companion cube so you aren’t alone on the journey, and from the burn marks, you know it’s your first companion cube. Her original heart, her first gift to you, a piece of her that she wants you to carry with you to remind you that she does care about you after everything. It also gives the lyrics to Still Alive a much more genuine meaning. 

Portal 2 ends, and then the ending song, another GLaDOS number plays. Just like Still Alive, Want You Gone is structurally a break up song and very obviously about GLaDOS missing Chell and “counting on” (read: caring about/loving) Chell’s tendencies and quirks. 

She’s accepted Chell completely, and yet also given Chell the one thing she wants most. Only wanting Chell gone can mean GLaDOS not wanting Chell in her life anymore, but can also mean she wants to give Chell the freedom she’s wanted for so, so long. It’s the best thing she can give.

In the co-op campaign, GLaDOS also references still caring about Chell.

And that’s the end of the Portal series. Except. Brace yourself. Despite the games being over, there is STILL more subtext somehow. It gets. Even gayer.

Exhibit C: Supplemental Evidence

Valve has made a lot of extra/cut content for the Portal series, and I’ll be looking at some of it below.

This official valentine from Valve shows GLaDOS offering a romantic partner cake, which as we’ve established before, is very symbolic of GLaDOS’ feelings about and/or relationship with Chell. 

There’s a lot of other concept art and official art that emphasizes their relationship too. See below.

There’s also some cut GLaDOS lines that are even gayer than the source material and again, sound like confessions or references to a breakup:

The idea of “discovering things about someone”... how much more obvious can it get?

The developers have even confirmed a lot of my commentary on Chell and GLaDOS’ relationship in The Final Hours Of Portal 2. See these quotes from the book/this post:

The devs literally describe it as a romance. They use terms like “cheating,” they wanted to write a romantic duet, JoCo purposefully wrote the endings like love songs. It is literally, blatantly said by the creators of the game that their relationship is interpreted romantically. By the creators of the game. 

And if Word of God confirmation isn’t enough for you, have a song written for a cut alternate ending by GLaDOS’ voice actress, Ellen McClain. The song is literally nothing but GLaDOS talking about caring about Chell, about not wanting her to die/leave GLaDOS alone, about wanting to bake a cake with Chell, about waiting for Chell to wake her up. It’s so genuinely sweet and sad, and really, really romantic in the most heartwrenching way possible. 

JoCo also came back for the Portal levels in Lego Dimensions, writing one final breakup song for GLaDOS to sing about Chell. It comes off as GLaDOS not wanting to admit she misses Chell even though she obviously does, trying to replace their relationship but failing, and even explicitly forgiving Chell/wanting her to come back.

Also, the “finally I understand,” as if only now GLaDOS understands just how deep her feelings for Chell are... What else can I say?

In Lego Dimensions, GLaDOS also outright rejects anyone who isn’t Chell.

In Conclusion:

Why do I ship Chell and GLaDOS? 

Well, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether I ship them. 

Because I think it’s glaringly obvious Portal does.

[slashy-ashy]

I love dickkory, dickkory is my favorite ship because those two were literally my first ship. I grew up with watching the Teen Titans and I instantly fell in love with them. It sucks that comic writers did what they did too Dick and Kory, I mean it pisses me off so badly, I hate how they made Dick sleep with Bab’s right before getting married with Kory to perpetuate this idea of theirs that Dick is a ladies man that can’t be chained down to one woman even though he loves the idea of having a family and the fact that Dick loves Kory so unconditionally it isn’t even fucking funny, and Kory loves Dick so unconditionally back too and the fact that she was the one who helped Dick be more open about his feelings and to be more loving towards himself and she’s basically the reason on why the fandom writes him as this mother hen, happy go lucky guy. Kory was the one to bring him out of his shell, along with the Titans because they helped out A LOT with bringing Dick out of his shell because depending on which retcon you want to go with Bruce is definitely not an entirely open guy especially when dealing with his emotions, I hate that when Dick was raped by Mirage (because they did have dubious sex, one party of the duo didn’t know that the other was a shapeshifter who turned into the love of his life and slept with him then turned back into their original form and laughed in his face when she revealed her so called master plan) they had the team, the team of SUPERHEROES WHO DEAL WITH THIS SITUATION IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER POSSIBLY ON THE DAILY VICTIM AND SLUT SHAME DICK, and it says a lot when the fans actually agree with the teammates who slut shame and disrespect their leader and not bat an eye at the fact that the literal SHAPESHIFTER is practically jumping with joy after emotionally manipulating and raping their leader, and people are so quick to say that after seeing Kory yelling and blaming Dick say how in character that is but don’t talk about how in a different issue Kory fucking attacks (as 👏🏾she 👏🏾 should👏🏾) Mirage because “how dare you sleep with Dick” and they don’t site how truly THAT is in character because it is in the character of her. She loves that man so fucking much she really does, and Dick is so fucking gone on her too it isn’t even funny, and I have nothing against DickBabs I love their dynamic too but I didn’t grow up with them and I wasn’t as introduced with them as I am with Dickkory in a sense and I truly just enjoy Dickkory more than Dickbab in my opinion but it’s mostly due to the writers and how they just fucking wrote Barbra like I just feel like if they took the time to rebuild their friendship, and to stop and look at her characterization over the years and learn to write her properly then yeah I would love DickBab’s but as it stands I’m hesitant to follow canon DickBabs and I honestly will accept fanon DickBabs more than likely.

Dickkory is such a wonderful ship because they have so much history with each other and honestly at this point most of my ships for Dick are just him with the fab five, I love DickRoy, I love DickWally, I love DickGarth and I love them even if they’re romantic or platonic, outside of the fab five I will say that I like DickJoey but only for the reason that I don’t really know Joey.

One gripe I have will be the fact that due to how writers have written and mistreated canon, people believe all of what I said up above to be canon behavior for Dick, I hate how hyper sexualized he is and I hate how it comes to a point that it becomes this running gag of “I wonder what I can get away with” and by that I mean the in canon instances of people touching Dick without his consent but it ends up being laughed off because the predator is just so good looking that it makes it okay, or how people will just say how good his ass looks, or even wonder out loud how good in bed he probably is and some old flame will just come out of the wood works with a smirk on their face being all “well ladies I can say that he is fantastic in bed” while Dick just stands there while listening to this all go down and being so used to this but he still will get flack if he says anything to show how uncomfortable he is with the situation because he “asked for it” or something else as disgusting and ridiculous, and after a while it just gets so old like honestly just find a new gag okay, it’s not that hard.

And finally J**Kory , J**Roy and J**KoryRoy are not my favorite ships whatsoever ever. They’re not even my favorite friendships to be honest, because I legit cannot see a world where like my older sibs friends would ever just decide to hang out with me and spend so much time with me and I would just be okay with that. No, no, no,no,no,NO! It just boggles my mind on why DC decided that Jason can’t possibly make friends with people himself and it irks the hell out of me that they nerfed Kory and Roy that hard it isn’t even funny.

Like it kind of is funny when you think about it because if they weren’t then I doubt I really doubt that those two would have just been like “ yep, I’m just going to hang out with the love of my life’s little brother” like I can see, just them from time to time just going to check in sometimes with Dick and him just being like “hey you guys want to come with me while I check in with Jason” and they could be like “yeah sure, I haven’t heard from him in a while” but for the most part no I just don’t see them realistically just deciding to just hang out with Jason because Kory has a planet to run and Roy has a daughter that he needs to parent and Jason has a lot of trauma and anger to get through in a responsible and reasonable way that doesn’t include running a drug empire, killing people, trying to kill his family, and just constantly blaming his actions on his trauma because I don’t want to sound too critical of him but at the same time it’s like when are you going to let go of all of this anger and just try to start healing because you keep taking the easy route of things and you decide to walk away from the problems eating you up inside and you just default to distancing himself away from his problems and family but when are you going to do the most important and difficult step, of beginning the process of healing and coming to terms with your actions and on how they don’t just affect you but also the people around you? If I saw an issue like that than I would most definitely pick up an red hood book but as it stands no. It’s a no from me y’all.

And DickKoryRoy is honestly where it’s at. They have DECADES of content and storylines that you can just be like “hmm, I want to write/draw about the Brother blood arc or I want to write/draw about how Dick went to save Lian and how this affected Roy” the content is there it really is.

I love how this post just devolved into me talking about my love for Dickkory, my hesitance towards DickBabs, me talking about the ships I love and like, how I hate how they (the writers) mishandled Dick and how they mishandled real problems that people go through in real life, how Jason with Kory and/or Roy is my first and ultimate NOTP, and how Dickkory and/or Roy is elite in my opinion.

[adrinoir]

Who will be the next Hawk Moth?

Alright, well there’s a lot of different theories on who will be “the next Hawk Moth”. So I wanted to do a break down on some possibilities (warning: this analysis is REALLY long lol)

Lila

I feel like Lila is very likely to be the next one. She already has a leg up in working with Gabriel (despite not knowing he’s Hawk Moth).

Even though Hawk Moth hasn’t reached his goal of getting Ladybug and Cat Noir’s miraculouses, he’s made good progress. With Lila’s help, he’s gotten PRETTY damn close to getting them since she has that deep hatred of Ladybug. Without her, he wouldn’t have had his invasion of scarlet moths possessing Paris.

Additionally, Lila is pretty full of herself and does just about everything for her own benefit. She could easily grow a bigger hatred towards Ladybug and find out about the benefits of their miraculouses to have her own wish granted.

It’s really difficult to see her as a redeemable character since she has yet to show any redeemable qualities. But, hey, maybe there will be a plot twist where she’ll change her ways.

Chloe

As much as I’d LOVE to see Chloe develop into a better person since we see she is the way she is, I don’t have too much faith in Thomas Astruc’s writing.

Thomas initially started Chloe off as the annoying and conceited bully, then she started seeing the error of her ways, and finally...she was pulled back to square one.

It’s obvious that Chloe is pretty strong. She knows Hawk Moth is evil and has fought off an akuma even when she was super angry with Ladybug. However, Hawk Moth IS a rather powerful man and was able to akumatize Chloe on many occasions. She became his most successful akumatized victim as Miracle Queen. I feel like the fandom doesn’t talk enough about how Chloe managed to get almost ALL the miraculous holders to reveal their identities. (Don’t come for Hawk Moth in saying he hasn’t made a lot of progress - he HAS.)

The main issue with Chloe is that she can easily be manipulated into doing things for Hawk Moth because she has that disliking for Ladybug, deep down. She doesn’t want to hate Ladybug but obviously it’s been tough since she won’t let Chloe have her bee miraculous, and being Queen Bee is very important to her. Chloe wants to be powerful and heroic to feel good about herself since her mom doesn’t see her as something special (which is awful, I feel so bad for Chloe, honestly.)

Even though the likelihood is there, I really don’t want Chloe to become the next Hawk Moth. In season 4, it’d be nice to see some of her character development come back, and hopefully her and her mom build a stronger relationship now that Audrey has decided to stay in Paris with the family. Thomas Astruc needs to make Chloe better but KEEP it that way. She’s shown redeemable qualities and we know why she acts the way that she does. There’s a ridiculous amount of potential for her to be a wonderful, well-rounded character instead of just the evil bully Thomas makes her out to be.

Felix

So far, we’ve only seen Felix in one episode, but we already have a good idea of what he’s like. He’s very manipulative as a form of coping with his father’s death.

Felix already has a bit of a vendetta against Gabriel for keeping Emilie’s family heirlooms, and managed to steal them from Gabriel. He also wasn’t very nice to Adrien in pretending to be him and attempting to hurt his friendships. All of those things Felix did just prove he’d make a *good* villain.

My theory is that he’ll come back for at least one more episode, since he took the wedding rings that were very precious to Gabriel. However, it’s kind of strange to me that Felix hasn’t even been mentioned since his debut episode. So, we will see if this devilish boy makes a comeback.

Adrien

People have had this theory a while back, but it’s just incredibly unlikely at this point.

Adrien cares deeply about his mom and wants her back, of course. However, we see in Cat Blanc that he tried to cataclysm his own father for what he’s done. He was so hurt by his father’s motives, he triggered the end of the world.

There could potentially be an episode where Adrien hears his father out and tries the butterfly miraculous out for himself, but Bunnyx would come out of her burrow and shut that shit down.

OR, we know Gabriel is an awful father and he could somehow manipulate his own son to take his spot as Hawk Moth. (But again, Bunnyx could easily shut this down, too.)

Adrien loves being Cat Noir; he’s shown to be the Cat Noir in the future. He has an extremely good heart. So they’ve pretty much denied Adrien becoming the new Hawk Moth, at this point.

Luka

I think this is the most interesting idea I’ve seen on who the next Hawk Moth will be. (I recommend watching Cat Blanc x Princess Justice’s YouTube video analysis on this. It’s really good! I mention some of her points in here.)

Luka is almost too nice of a character. He cares a lot about other people and just sort of lets Marinette take advantage of his kindness, which is really sad, BUT there could easily be a motive we don’t know behind that, or he’s secretly bothered by it deep down.

There’s that theory that Luka knows Marinette is Ladybug. He could be trying to get closer to her to take the miraculous from her since he might know the power the ladybug and black cat miraculous hold.

Or, like I mentioned before, if Luka is bothered deep down by Marinette’s romantic feelings for Adrien, there could be something that happens that pushes him over the edge. We’ve even seen that Luka makes a terrifying villain as Silencer. He was super manipulative and had a lot of good tactics. Ladybug and Cat Noir DID in fact have a really hard time fighting him. Luka is also not the type of person to get angry like that, but Hawk Moth needs STRONG emotion to feed off of. So, considering how powerful of a villain Luka was, there’s clearly some anger boiling within him.

We also don’t have that much of a backstory to work off of. We’re slowly learning more, but think about it, for instance, we don’t know who his father is. Some people have theorized it’s Jagged Stone but we’re REALLY not sure. So, maybe it’s a motive of his to find his father.

Thomas Astruc made Luka a very likable character, enough so to get most of the fandom to actually like the Lukanette ship. Luka could have been made purposely likable so that the fandom won’t believe that he will be the next villain.

Another good point Cat Blanc x Princess Justice had made was that Miraculous World made a tweet that Miraculous will be introducing a new villain in season 4 - but it’s a character we already know. Lila and Felix are already known BUT they’re also already well-established villains....

Kagami

If Luka is a possibility, so is Kagami. Half the fandom thinks Kagami is great, the other half thinks she’s awful.

Kagami is shown to have a very strong personality (that sometimes comes off as a bit threatening). She’s very blunt about everything, very uptight, doesn’t beat around the bush. Those three characteristics are similar to Gabriel, HOWEVER Kagami has a caring soul and she really wants to be good to Adrien and Marinette.

So, it’s possible, but unlikely and definitely hard to pinpoint what intentions she could possibly have of becoming a villain. Maybe her mother pinches a certain nerve, or she can’t understand why Adrien doesn’t love her.

Additionally, Thomas Astruc doesn’t cut Adrien a lot of slack, let’s be real here. Adrien’s father is already Hawk Moth, he could switch it to his “girlfriend” being Hawk Moth.

Alya

So, I have a bit of an interesting theory on this since I haven’t really seen anyone else mention anything about Alya potentially becoming bad.

Despite Alya/Rena Rouge having a strong bond and trust with Ladybug, there’s that possibility she still wants to unveil who Ladybug really is - she still runs The Ladyblog, after all. And of course, unveiling Ladybug’s identity is extremely dangerous. She even posted the museum exhibit to her blog in Feast, which she didn’t realize was dangerous. It shows that she might slip and reveal something that she shouldn’t have.

Or, maybe Alya manages to lose Ladybug’s trust. Something monumental could happen. There’s already that bit of danger surrounding Ladybug and Rena Rouge since they’re such close friends in real life and know nearly everything about each other.

Hawk Moth also now knows that Alya is Rena, and could do something to push her to reveal something on The Ladyblog, therefore turning her into a villain.

Also, Alya already knows SO much of the Ladybug lore. She’s dedicated so much time to researching the lore behind the miraculouses. Also pretty dangerous and suspicious.

Nino

Like Alya, there’s a chance Nino also loses Ladybug and/or Cat Noir’s trust. When Nino first got his miraculous, he wasn’t very good at acting like a different person in his superhero persona. He could easily slip and reveal an something he isn’t supposed to.

He is the least likely possibility, but not completely impossible.

Tom or Sabine

I put these two in the same excerpt because they have about the same amount of likeliness to be the next Hawk Moth (or maybe one is Hawk Moth and the other is Mayura 👀)

Tom and Sabine are both super sweet, but also, we don’t know a whole lot about them. Since Gabriel - father of sweet cinnamon roll hero Cat Noir - is Hawk Moth, who’s to say superhero Ladybug’s own parents couldn’t become evil? It’d create a super interesting dynamic in the plot because it’s like how would Marinette react if one of her parents was Hawk Moth?

I have a stronger theory that Tom and Sabine used to be the old Ladybug and Cat Noir, but still. Don’t put it past Thomas Astruc to trick us somehow.

How would Gabriel fail (or lose his miraculous)?

One last thing I’d also like to analyze relating to this is this question.

Does Gabriel NOT end up ever getting Ladybug and Cat Noir’s miraculouses? Let’s look over some possibilities:

1) One of the villains he creates or senti-monsters Nathalie creates becomes too powerful and doesn’t give him the miraculouses once they’re captured.

2) He gives up and realizes all he needs is his dearest son Adrien.

3) He gets sickly and can’t fight anymore and passes on his miraculous for someone else to do the job.

4) Simplest answer: His miraculous is stolen.

[bettsfic]

do you know anything about like, the development of the purity rhetoric that now seems to be ubiquitous in fandom and how it got there? i used to be on tumblr in like, 2014 and only recently came back to fandom and i remember everyone being generally kind of cool with things like incest ships and morally grey characters (speaking specifically re the frozen fandom and elsa/anna here lmao) whereas now it seems like the conversation about those things has drastically shifted and i am..puzzled by it

this is what i imagine that experience was like for you:

according to fanlore, purity culture started in the homestuck fandom which. based on what i know of homestuck, that tracks. however i’ve never been in homestuck so i’m not sure what that transformation was like. all i know is my personal experience with the disk horse. afaik there’s no cohesive timeline of events across fandom, and i lack the time and resources to be able to make one myself. if anyone knows of one, or wants to make one, please let me know.

i do know that purity culture is a movement started by very young teenagers, who were maybe 13-15 in 2014 and are now 18-20. they were 8-10 when ao3 was founded, and therefore seem to have a limited knowledge of fan history, censorship, and critical thinking. i’m hoping that since they’re now entering college, they’ll get some insight and broader social awareness, and this movement will finally die out in the next few years. 

on any other platform, at any other time, their toxic rhetoric would not have gained traction. but here and now, on tunglr dot com where anyone can gain a platform, where mob mentality thrives and inciting an anonymous dogpile is as easy as hitting Post, where the brokenness of this place makes it difficult to control the content you’re exposed to -- it’s the perfect storm. we live in an age of hopelessness. young people grow up with social media as an extension of their identities, tethered to devices that hold all the information in the world. i think it’s fair for them to be afraid of their futures, and i can understand the desire to control the online spaces where they have the most agency, where their voices are the loudest. 

that may explain why, but not how. as in, where did they pick up this mentality at all? @freedom-of-fanfic (whose work is a necessity in understanding the disk horse) connected anti-shipping to TERF rhetoric. i’ve linked the fanlore page because it has all of the links and some of the responses. i honestly do believe that the language surrounding purity culture has its ugly roots in TERFdom. at its core, purity culture -- the policing of female and queer sexuality -- is misogyny. 

when i started writing destiel circa 2014, fandom was as you described. wincest was a juggernaut on par with destiel. teen wolf was full of underage and noncon. a/b/o was on the rise. it seemed like fandom was a genre without restraint -- anything you wrote, if it found the right audience, would be celebrated unabashedly. people who have been following me for a long time know that i was addicted to adderall at the time and pounding out all sorts of manic nonsense. i remember living on the validation of comments (and at the time, there were lots of comments. not so much anymore, but that’s another story). i got critical comments only rarely, and they were the type that i admired -- readers without judgment thinking through the story, reacting to it earnestly. i made some of my best friends because they left long, critical comments on my work. sometimes they didn’t like it, sometimes they did, but ultimately, they were engaged, and that’s what counted.

i remember my first policing-type comment, i think at the start of all the purity nonsense. it was a destiel fic, and someone very angrily told me i should tag my bottom!cas because it was triggering. i’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years. top/bottom discourse is nothing new, but to say that bottom castiel is triggering? that was ridiculous. but then i realized -- there was a writer in fandom at the time i won’t name, who was known for being extremely sensitive (for bottom!cas especially, which they found triggering), and their very dedicated following offered fic that was safe for their fave to read. i have nothing against this person at all. they were not part of the purity discourse, they were up front about their sensitive nature, and as far as i knew (i believe i met them at a con once?) they were very kind. 

but that commenter had been clearly influenced by this person and believed that a specific fictional character receiving anal sex from another specific fictional character was actual, real triggering content, and it was my obligation as a writer to tag for it. which i did, because i felt bad, and i was baffled by that request. at the time, i wanted more than anything to be liked, and conformed wherever i could. if i got such a request now, i would ignore it because it was rudely written and honestly kind of bonkers. i’d happily add a tag for something i may have missed, or even something i’d never considered before, but there’s no reason a person can’t make that request politely. 

this situation isn’t about purity discourse proper (the commenter didn’t tell me not to write the fic, and it had nothing to do with morality), but it’s the earliest example i can think of where the process of policing had occurred: a person of influence on tumblr affected their follower’s thinking, and that follower felt entitled to command another writer to conform to that ideology.

i could be completely wrong about making these connections. maybe that commenter truly believed bottom!cas was a legitimate widespread trauma. they did not say the fic was triggering to them, but that it might be to some other people, in the same way purity police say “think of the CHILDREN” when in fact they don’t give a fuck about children at all. 

after destiel i moved to stucky, which was, at the time, a juggernaut ship where anyone could write anything. this was also the time when the term “cinnamon roll” became incredibly popular, circa 2015. it was a fun and seemingly innocuous meme, but it positioned the ideas of “purity” and “wholesomeness” in sharp relief, and cemented these ideas by beginning to give it a distinct vocabulary. “trash” was pitched as its opposite. stucky is where i first came into contact with “antis.” in destiel, there had been ship wars, sure, but it was of a different flavor than antis. destiel vs wincest wasn’t about morality in 2014. it was about everything but.

in stucky in 2015, however, the disk horse was running rampant. the MCU had a sub-section of fandom called HTP (hydra trash party) in which steve and/or bucky have dubious or nonconsensual relations with various or many members of hydra. this is the first time i remember being aware of morality becoming a cornerstone of shipping. HTP was loathed by purity police. by the time i wrote a stucky bdsm au, i’d accumulated multiple nasty anons, rude comments from entitled readers, and other nonsense that all said the same thing: your filth is not welcome here in our space of purity. go away.

but the release of the force awakens is what really turned the tide. TFA offered three major ships: stormpilot (as it was called at the time, now finnpoe), reylo, and kylux. the fandom that developed around the sequels was firmly divided. franzeska wrote an amazing meta about this phenomenon which gives some insight into the seeds of purity policing. in short, stormpilot should have been the primary pairing of the sequels, but instead many of the badwrong writers from other fandoms (and HTP specifically, which was how i entered the fandom) flocked to the blank slate of kylux. 

it took a long time for the ship to gain traction. a friend told me that kylux had started with angry star wars racists who hated that there was diversity in the sequel trilogy. and i told them no, i was there, there were twelve of us and a cornchip, and all we cared about was the dirty/darkly comedic potential of these two ridiculous villain characters in one of the biggest franchises of all time. it wasn’t that complicated. i don’t mean to dismiss the discussion of race in fandom; i think it’s important to acknowledge that racism, as franzeska describes far better than i can, plays a huge part in fandom, particularly in star wars, and it’s an important and ongoing discussion to be having, especially given what kelly marie tran has gone through, and how it affected (presumably) rose tico’s extremely limited presence in TROS.

the early fics of kylux weren’t particularly taboo. they were post-TFA hurt/comfort mostly, then slowly the bdsm and power dynamics crept in. those of us who wanted to get away from purity discourse had finally found a new home. for a while. 2016 was the golden era of kylux. we were all very happy.

i remember talking to a friend about how there were certain things i couldn’t write in certain ships. being from ye olden days of fandom, she was appalled by this idea, and told me i could write anything for any ship i wanted, wasn’t that was the whole point of transformative works? and i agreed! but i tried to explain, if you post badwrong for a fandom of purity police, you’re going to, at best, get dogpiled in your comments/inbox. at worse they will find you, call your employer, and try to ruin your life. people will tell you to kill yourself. they’ll report your tumblr and try to get your blog shut down. there are real-life, harrowing consequences to writing taboo fic, and many who write fic as a hobby don’t have the emotional energy to field these risks.

around this time, discord became popular, which offered a private space for badwrong writers to congregate. i had started grad school and didn’t have much time to write fic. metoo was happening. tromp got elected. kylux was slowly turning mainstream so a lot of us turned our attention to gradence in fantastic beasts. some went on to hannibal and other fandoms that hadn’t yet caught the attention of purity police (but it was, as it is now, just a matter of time). kylux, i feel, was specifically decimated by a single fan creator, who was like a police chief. they would get wind of someone writing underage or noncon and write a call-out post about them, and that writer/artist would get pitchforked. a few times, my comments or posts got screencapped, and posts were written urging people to stop reading my works because of how heinously immoral i was. this happened to several of my friends too. 

the great tumblr tittyban of 2017 happened, which only added fuel to the fire and further legitimized the purity movement. i shifted hesitantly to the 100 fandom, which seemed small in comparison to supernatural, marvel, and star wars. i thought it was a chill place. i was wrong; it was just as toxic as other fandoms. but i also didn’t care anymore, and i appreciated that i was mostly left alone. more importantly, i found a lot of support from other people who were as tired of the purity as i was, and @the100kinkmeme was reborn. 

the state of things is pretty abysmal. there are some really amazing writers out there writing under multiple sock accounts, keeping their fandom identities shattered so as not to call attention to themselves. as much as i understand why writers do that, and i respect that decision, i also think it’s sad. it deprives readers the chance to read that author’s other works. it limits the sense of community and our ability to make friends. it fractures the future of the genre.

what’s most important to acknowledge is that none of this is happening solely in fandom. i went to a writers’ conference where 2 of 3 panels were about the history of moral policing and censorship in art. it is worth noting that of the 40-ish visiting writers on faculty, only one (1) was a woman of color (jaimaica kincaid). naturally, older rich white people who have spent their life in the arts are all about death of the author, separation of art and artist. they’re on the total opposite side of purity police, and they won’t acknowledge at all that racism and sexism are a problem in the creative world. they don’t have any nuance on the discussion, or modern perspectives in light of metoo or popular culture. 

this went on longer than i anticipated. i neglected to mention YFIP (your fave is problematic) an old blog that started the idea of call-out culture by pulling receipts on celebrities, and how call-out culture led to cancel culture, which also aided in the purity disk horse. i think a lot can be said about how some of this stuff is genuinely good (metoo and holding men accountable for their bullshit) while also being profoundly toxic (punishing criminals via mob mentality, ruining their careers and livelihoods through social media, rather than giving them their due process in court. i understand it -- the judicial system is built by the hands of the very predators we seek to condemn, but still. the jury of the internet is never a fair trial). 

if you want to read more, my tag is tsatp (the sacred and the profane). i’m sure i’ve left out a lot, but i can only speak to my experience. i think it would be good if people would share their experience dealing with purity policing, too, so we might get a cohesive timeline in place. feel free to reblog and add your story.

[tonyglowheart]

Trying to semi-organize my thoughts on what exactly I am wanting out of spn fic and hm let's see. If I remember this post in the future, I may update it as I think of/on things and use this for reference so I, also, don't forget lol

Okay so, wants/likes:

Cas prominent. He is my, as I believe the kpop kids say, bias, so he is kind of non-negotiable. Sorry I am just not interested in fics where he is not prominent

Destiel not required but a good plus. Slight preference for intricate courtship rituals over ones where they figure things out ridiculously easy, unless it is established relationship. If the revelation comes too quick and easy then I get taken out of the moment :')

Optional: Angels treating Cas like their baby brother :3 Cas can be somewhat put out by it or not. Actually maybe bonus if he IS, bc they are all angels of the lord and relative by rank and experience, And Yet [whoever] just cannot help but be *points* Baby

canonverse is plus. canon divergence is okay but idk how close to canon I'm looking for, if it's too close to an episode rewrite I may not be into that either

casefics are cool. If it's got that canon-typical vaguely racist sht then pls warn me going in 😔

Found family. Family don't end in blood!!! Spn may forget this but I never will!!!

Any exploration of the whole fucky destiel thematic dichotomies, the whole free will vs destiny shit, stuff like words of prophets are written on subway walls, like.. idk, something that is intricate-rituals-gay and also makes me think of the philosophy of thehuman condition

corollary: slow burns ig?? or like mutual pining? canon typical thinking they are not worthy or that it is something they cannot have? canon typical did not realize until later but even then they have their individual canon-typical reasons for not acting on it, until they do bc it's fic so they can get together for realsies?

trope: Cas and/or Destiel being parents. I read one recently where it was like single dad Cas (to Claire and Jack) and then Dean came (back) into his life recently and I rly liked it

AUs are fine but highly subject to mood so we'll see. I did read a Star Trek-y AU I liked

I'm down for a lot of various other kinds of plot tropes and stuff, tho I want stuff that's more character and plot and less, like, pwp or fuck or die or that kinda thing

trope: curses maybe? I've found a couple curse-focused fics which were interesting

trope: Hurt/Comfort of the Cas whump kind but not necessarily have to be just Cas. But like.. u know when Uriel is beating him up and he looks all bloody and beautiful, or when he flexes his sexy angel powers and transports the Winchesters to the past but then collapses bc he overtaxed himself, or when he had that blanket on when he was suffering from the attack dog spell.... yeah,,,

trope: Anything with like the Winchesters caring about and caring for Cas. I just rly like Cas being taken care of :') pls wrap him in a blanket and pat his shoulder brusque-softly in ur emotionally repressed way Dean

bottom line my emphasis tends to be more on character and plot. I can't do plot without character, the relationships - whether ship or gen - are important to my enjoyment of a fic. I can sit thru a lot if the characters/character dynamics are good and chewy lmao like u can rly sink ur teeth into it

Bonus features:

eldritch horror angels are a bonus. Give me unfathomable trueform angels, I feel like I don't see that enough

wings* but.... caveat I like my spn wings more metaphysical than literal unless they're literal for a point, but this isn't set in stone either. I'm just... slightly tired of the physicality of the wings I guess. Like it's not the physicality that's the issue, ig, but when it's not treated as metaphysical (as well)

wouldn't mind some good endverse fics to chew on altho that might also make me sad

Cas being cute, a la crazy!Cas (who is.... so soft.... his innocence.. *clutches chest*) or like when Cas and Dean went to talk to that police guy and Cas was like you tell them it's angels and demons warring and he will tell you what he knows, or when Cas was like I'm gonna become a hunter :3, or interrogating the cat, or this is his serious face, yes

Powerful af Cas?? I miss season 4/5 Cas, when he was powerful and self-assured and wasn't "mentally deficient puppy" as Metatron meanly put it Cas. I feel like we get less of that as the seasons go on... I miss Cas being powerful and exuding energy that I'm sure is what had ppl assigning him as top energy. Like yes flex ur sexy sexy angel powers pls. There's one ep where my notes just say "ANGEL SMITE ANGEL SMITE / HEAAALING." Season 6 Cas where he is more out of touch with humanity and more brusque was also intriguing even tho he was like that bc of extenuating circumstances. But him flexing his sexy angel powers sure was sexy

Do not wants :(

Endgame human!Cas. Sorry I like short-lived Cassidy am more into feathered Cas than human!Cas. endgame human!Cas just isn't a good solution/happy ending to me, I don't think Cas needs to change to be able to live happily, and also I like to chew on the like philosophical underpinnings of an immortal/mortal pairing if that does get called into question lol

Human AU* but like asterisk bc I will take human AU if the plot is compelling and/or the characterization still manages to capture that je nais se quoi of canonverse. If they are, like, middle age dads being domestic, as an example, tho, then I can probs do that, I just like.. have limited capacity for career-based AUs for the sake of it, if that makes sense... But character/character dynamics trumps all, like I said lmao.. I've sat thru scenarios/setups that lowkey dealt me psychic damage bc of the nature of the set dressing, bc I checked it out out of morbid curiosity but the way they did the characterization ended up working for me

A/B/O - I am not seeking A/B/O at the moment

Hurt no Comfort - it would make me too sad :(

fics that treat angels like literal physical feathered beings. Idk I just like... want the whole angel thing to be treated more metaphysically. They are multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent in holy corporate/business attire visages but they are still very much multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent the ballpark size of our Chrysler building. If the wings are treated too literally I find I start getting bored, ironically. This is ironic bc I'm a slut for wingfic. But with spn I find that a conventional kind of wingfic/angel conception where the wings are just limbs with maybe some slight handwaved dimension-shifting stowing is.. slightly passe for my tastes. Unless it's like a forced manifestation or sth. Just like.. get the metaphysics involved, tie it to angelic grace. Something. Make is racy. But not too racy, the whole wings-as-erogenous-zones thing I'm a bit over too, xenobiology to humans would just be biology to these beings, it doesn't make sense to me to be like "oh they have a tail and it's EXTRA sensitive," like are you suggesting your arm/armpit is an extra special species-typical erogenous zone too?

deaging unless it ties to some other kinda plotty deal somehow ig? Like... I got invested in this fandom for them as they are now I'm not too interesting in unseasoned nibling vers

this maybe goes with the human aus tho that's a slight asterisk but hard line no high school aus. pls I cannot take the psychic damage that would deal to me personal

I have no conclusion even tho I feel like I need one. here's wonderwall? ig I can stumble around looking for reclists and see if anything sticks out, trawling thru tags so far has been a mixed bag

Anyway haha lol, stand-up-style-tone I mean I'm not asking for a lot amirite. Just a nebulously specific set of intricate rituals wrapped around a plot and also found family or something, like you know, just a trifling

[t100ficrecsblog]

an interview with @easilydistractedbyfanfic (she/they)

what are you working on right now? I don’t typically take prompts, but after finding out about the Bellarke Writers For BLM Initiative and how their goal is to raise money for BLM via various fandom prompts that are requested by readers and written & illustrated by various writers and artists, I wanted to get involved. I’ve finished two prompts and am working on my third, which is a Murphy/Raven smutfic set during their years on the Ring. It’s definitely an idea I can work with - it’s over 10k at this point with a lot more to say, so hopefully the anon who requested it will end up pleased! Go check out the tumblr page and the ao3 collection - there’s various t100 pairings/ratings and you can choose the cause if you want to request a fic!

what is the fanwork you’re most proud of? I struggled with this question! My stories are all like my kids, and even if some of them could use a bit of improvement with pacing or dialogue or whatever faults I see when they age, ultimately I do love them all and I’m glad I wrote them. I do sometimes play favorites but that often depends on what I’m in the mood to read myself. That said, I really do always feel proud of my story called What You Need. It’s a darker version of Raven & Murphy, but one that I don’t find unrealistic under the circumstances of the fic. I surprised myself with where my head went on this one. In a good way, because it was really fascinating to dive into the minds of who these particular versions of the characters were. 

I’m also pleased that I have over 500k on ao3 at this point. I never expected anything like this when I started writing, and it kind of blows my mind that this is my hobby now. It’s so strange to me that there are stories in my head at any given moment now.

why did you first start writing fic? I started writing in June 2018. Never wrote any fanfic before that, ever - though I did read plenty! I wrote three stories super fast, posted them all on ao3 on the same day and haven’t looked back. I think I started writing out of a combination of just really needing more content for my faves, but also I wasn’t in fandom before s5 and was quite desperate after s4 to talk to other people about Raven & Murphy. So I needed to get the stories out but also I had this hope that it would invite conversation when I didn’t know anyone in fandom.

what frustrates you most about fic writing? Just because I want to write doesn’t mean I can. Having prompts on my plate right now, I feel a real responsibility to finish them, but even when I carve time out to write, sometimes the words just don’t feel right. The muse doesn’t always strike when I have the time available. Also, it’s super ridiculously important to me that scenes and dialogue FEEL right based on the characterization I have in my head in any particular story. I can look at a scene I’ve written, especially an emotional one, and sometimes it’s just not resonating with me the way I know it could or should. It’s tough not to just push through and post it as-is, but I know that would never satisfy me, even if it means a much longer turn-around time on a story or chapter update. Often I will find that I get an a-ha moment that cracks open a better understanding of why a scene isn’t working for me, but this can take time and I have to trust in this process.

Not to preach, but it’s also frustrating when something you spend a lot of time and effort on doesn’t get much in the way of comments. I see posting fic on ao3 as a sort of conversation, so when there’s mostly silence even as the hits (and hopefully kudos) tick upwards, it can feel really...disheartening to feel like you’re talking into a void. And I say this as someone who has been fortunate enough to have regular readers who DO give feedback! I think every writer understands that they need to write for themselves first and foremost, but I wish more readers understood that feedback and enthusiasm will absolutely result in MORE CONTENT! I try very hard to follow this guideline myself by supporting and commenting on everything I read as time permits.

what are your top five songs right now? I listen to a huge mix of songs & my childhood influenced me a lot. 

Some floating in my head include - 

Chris Cornell’s live cover of Nothing Compares 2U Indigo Girls - Romeo & Juliet The Decemberists - Once In My Life Tori Amos - Silent All These Years The Chicks - March March 

what are your inspirations (books, songs, other fic)? I find inspiration in a lot of things, which I think is lucky. One of my biggest is the characters themselves. I love getting deep into understanding who I think they are, what their motivations are and why they’d make certain decisions, whether in canon or in an AU. What parts of their personalities do they keep when they aren’t tortured and under trauma on the regular? What would happen if I change this one scenario in their lives? I could probably go on forever just based on these sorts of thoughts, but I do also find inspiration in simple things like tropes, or song lyrics and the lore of the show itself. Quite a lot of my ideas in my inspiration notebook have sci-fi themes too. A few of my stories have already touched on sci-fi topics, and I absolutely plan more of them because I love how creative that can be. I also love the idea of suspended belief - can I have sentient plant life from an alien planet that can mindread & communicate by projecting thoughts into characters' heads? Yes, yes I can! (I wrote this story, fyi - Flora Incognita, part of a series) 

what attracts you to Murven? what first attracted you? Hey, do you have all day? Ha! Seriously, I could talk about this until everyone wants to strangle me! I loved Raven immediately - not so much Murphy! But I really disliked Finn, so ep 1x10 when Raven finally broke up with him had me interested. In that ep, you can see that Murphy is present, awake & nearby in the Dropship and probably overhears everything Raven says. Then he gets up and looks at her to make sure she’s still sleeping before he carries out his revenge plans. I’m not kidding - that one look absolutely and completely hooked me! Murphy was still awful then but he was so much more interesting than Finn, and back then I remember thinking how I’d really like to see them interact as two stubborn, strong personalities, because no doubt sparks would fly. And then when they did interact more, their dynamic was exactly what I’d hoped for and then some! 

I love that they’ve seen each other at their worst and at their weakest and most vulnerable, yet they’ve built a strong foundation of trust, faith and understanding. They have so much in common but they’re also different sides of the coin in some ways too. Fandom talks about Bellarke being the head & the heart, but to me Raven and Murphy are the intellect & the instinct - they complement each other, provide some of the qualities that the other needs, their differences improve each other. For me, nobody gets Raven like Murphy & nobody understands Murphy like Raven. Maybe not a lot of people notice, but Raven & Murphy check in with each other a lot - Raven tends to say “I got this” but Murphy is the only person who replies to her “Do you?”. And Raven listens to Murphy’s ideas and suggestions and plans even when she’s known as the genius because she knows that he has valuable things to say. They have fun together, make each other smile and enjoy each other’s company, which is in such short supply in this show! 

I know there’s parts of fandom that don’t ship them because Murphy shot Raven in s1. I have a lot of thoughts on it and have had quite a few tumblr posts about it. This is a fictional show - it does not reflect reality. I’ve been on the fringes of fandom for a long time and I know shipping doesn’t always mean yes, I want to see this relationship in real life. For me, I think it’s absolutely fascinating that someone Raven should hate has become one of her closest and most trusted friends. That she forgave him, and we as the audience get to see this dynamic change and grow, and that Murphy has always felt guilty about it even though he was being presented as selfish and out for himself - it’s such a huge, huge part of each of their character’s journeys. This is getting rather meta, but I don’t think either of these characters would have survived this long or evolved to the extent that they each have without specifically being around each other. 

And I absolutely can not discuss my love for Raven & Murphy without mentioning the whole way these two LOOK at each other! OMG have you SEEN it?!?? How could I not ship them when they look at each other like that! LOL! Also, I want to keep talking about this but I’ll stop now because I truly could go on forever and anyone who follows me already knows I’m wordy.

BESIDES Murven, what’s your favorite ship in t100? Honestly, nothing else comes close to Murven for me, but I did like Kabby before the show just eviscerated their characters. I like the possibilities of Niytavia still. I can see why people ship Murphamy in the earlier seasons. Definitely think Echo/Roan could’ve been something intriguing. And I’ve got this weird thing going right now where I wouldn’t hate Murphy/Russheda, but admittedly that’s mostly about the aesthetic! I tried really hard to like other partners for Raven & Murphy since they’ve always been my faves, but I’ve been meh about all the possibilities except Luna as a partner for Raven or as a Luna/Raven/Murphy threesome. At some point I might write that. Otherwise I’d say I tend to like the friendships more than the ships.

what are some things you’d like to recommend? I always hesitate to recommend other stories & authors because I can’t stand the idea of people feeling left out if I forget to mention them! But I would like to say that I really and truly love my fellow Murven shippers who read & support my stories and who create content like fic and art and gifs and fanvids. I find so much inspiration in them even though sometimes I can’t get through 30 seconds of a fanvid before I have to pause it because the angst is too much for me!

Since you’re kind enough to ask me this question and maybe a few people will read this answer, please - I recommend that everyone educate themselves on social justice and climate change and Black Lives Matter and capitalism and unions and what intersectionality & solidarity truly mean! Vote like your lives depend on it because THEY DO!

ed’s note: compiled a few resources -Rebel Well: A Starter Survival Guide to Trumped America -Jacob and Al’s Intergalactic Intersectionality Adventure -Get involved in your local chapter of DSA -Join Your Local Mutual Aid Group -Keeping Yourself Safe Online In This Capitalistic Hellscape -Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? -Resource about defunding the police

You can find @easilydistractedbyfanfic here on Tumblr, on Twitter, and on AO3. You can also a request a fic written by her via @bellarkefic-for-blm!

[five-wow]

I have a little crisis going on. My friend saw me checking in on tumblr on my phone a week or so ago and asked me what I was looking at. I told her about H 5-0 and McDanno. She likes gay ships and started watching.When she was finished with season one and had watched the conclusion of the season final she asked me why Danny ditched Rachel in favor of Steve. I told her because he loves him – duh! But I guess she just doesn't feel the vibes for that ship. (1/2)

She told me while she got why maybe Steve would fall for Danny she didn’t understood how Danny could develop feelings for Steve, didn’t even get how they’ve become friends with all the arguing. I know I can’t convince her and I don’t want to.But when I was home again, it got me thinking… and to my sheer horror I nearly came up with nothing (okay, he payed for the dolphin swimming and helped finding Meka’s murderer, was there for the memorial service) but otherwise? (2/2)            

Dear god, I don’t know myself why Danny would fall for Steve. I haven’t watched season 1 in a while. Could you please remember me? Sorry for the Long three part ask. (3/3)             

OKAY SO. Tragically, I haven’t watched season 1 in a while either, because I still haven’t gotten around to that rewatch I keep saying I should probably do, BUT. HOWEVER. YET.

It might be a bit of a mess, but I’m always ready to ramble about why Danny might fall for Steve. This ended up as nearly 2k words, so I’ll put it under a cut:

I think that a crucial first thing to understand is that when Danny yells, it does not necessarily mean he’s genuinely angry. I definitely get how if you do interpret it that way, the entire show could just kind of look like Danny doesn’t even like Steve very much, let alone loves him. Yelling CAN mean he’s angry, and of course it often DOES mean that, but just as often (or perhaps even more) it overwhelmingly means that he cares. Loudly. Right in your face. (There’s a later episode, 3.15, in which Steve does something heroic but stupid and Danny yells at him afterwards and Steve goes, kind of gleefully, “You were worried about me” and Danny says “Worried? No, no, I was worried about my car” but it’s VERY obvious that he’s lying, like, to the point where that’s the whole joke here. There are probably other instances that prove the yelling-Danny-does-not-mean-a-Danny-who-doesn’t-like-you, but this is my favorite because it’s extremely, blindingly obvious, and the narrative actively wants us to see it that way.)

To jump right in with the deep stuff: Steve offered Danny a job and gave him a family and a place in Hawaii and a purpose and the feeling of being useful, and he did it at a time when Danny was living a pretty miserable existence where even after six months he was still being hazed by the other Detectives for being the haole who wears a tie. Danny tells Tani in one of the very early season 8 episodes that Steve has a way of coming into people’s lives at just the right time, and that he did that for everyone on the team, including Danny. Obviously if you’re watching season 1 you can’t know what’s being said in season 8, but it’s just confirmation of stuff that’s definitely there on screen in season 1, too.

Steve is good at his job. Really, really good, and even if his methods are crazy, he ends up helping people. Danny can be shocked at the means and still appreciate the end at he same time.

Steve’s surprisingly smart, too. A bit of a dork sometimes - Steve with that teacup in 1.10? “I like tea.” NERD. (He’s also absolutely saying that to rile Danny up, and essentially that just means he enjoys arguing with Danny which is SO PERFECT for Danny, who can’t stop it even if he tries. More about that later.)

Steve makes Danny laugh. It may sometimes be a laugh borne out of shock, perhaps even anger, but there’s definitely laughter. (Steve also goes along with Danny’s silly banter and smiles about it - Danny’s “you miss me, don’t you?” when Steve is being a super secret spy on the museum ship in 1.07 and Steve’s “yeah, yeah” and “but you don’t swim” are a wonderful example.)

But then, on top of all of that, Steve is also kind. Of course there’s the hotel room with dolphin swimming he gives Danny as an apology after Danny makes it clear that he thinks he deserves one (which, by the way, still make me scream a little, because everything after that one moment ALWAYS portrays Steve as extremely unwilling to spend a lot of money on anything, even gifts, AND because yes, it’s a way to apologize, but it’s also something that immediately shows Steve gets Danny, because it’s not just for Danny, it’s for Grace! it’s for Danny to have fun with Grace), but he also makes a call to the Governor when Danny has issues with Rachel over visitation rights for Grace, and he does it behind Danny’s back. He comes to Meka’s funeral, not because he needs to grieve, but because Danny is grieving. When Grace and Rachel get car-jacked and Danny has to leave suddenly in the middle of a case, Steve’s immediate response is to tell him to call if he needs anything and then look completely thrown for a moment after Danny leaves. tl;dr: Steve CARES, and Danny, a man who is definitely not stupid, knows this. I mean, it’s not like he has to look far to see it anyway - he experiences it, over and over and over again. (And Steve’s there like this for the whole team, not just Danny, but in season 1 it’s definitely mostly Danny, because after Steve he just has the most problems, poor guy.)

(Side note, that episode I mentioned in which Grace and Rachel get car-jacked and Danny rushes to them? 1.16? Later on, Steve is going full camouflage ninja in the forest on his own and then his phone starts buzzing and he sees it’s Danny and the first thing he does after picking up is ask “are Grace and Rachel okay?” and when Danny then asks about the case he goes “don’t worry about that” to calm Danny down, and they end up having a lengthy conversation about Danny’s problem while Steve is panting trying to hold a log in the air for some very important SEAL reason, but he doesn’t complain a single time or even mention that he’s kind of busy. Danny needs him, so he’s available.)

And I mean, obviously, there’s these: “Maybe you’re not as alone around here as you think, Danno.” “I know you.” “I picked you, didn’t I?”

If I can just circle back around to something we’ve sort of covered: Danny yells a lot. He has a temper. He gets angry. He doesn’t get along super well with most people, and then along comes Steve, who initially INFURIATES Danny to the point where Danny ends up hitting him after they meet, but instead of getting angry back or holding a grudge, Steve is impressed and takes it in stride and still wants Danny to work with him because he sees Danny’s talents, and he doesn’t let himself be intimidated by the attitude. He lets Danny rant and get angry and he argues back but also calms Danny down when needed, and everything we’re shown indicates that he enjoys that dynamic. Essentially, Steve is the ideal partner for Danny, and Steve is also lonely and he’s loyal to a fault and they have a similar sense of humor and their banter flows ridiculously smoothly right from day one and their personalities just click and Steve keeps inviting Danny over for beer and letting him walk into his kitchen unannounced and dragging him into Steve’s classic car for its first test drive, so what do you know? Steve’s also a really great best friend.

Danny says Steve is terrible with kids and then Steve is actually GREAT with Grace. Like, when Danny gets hit with the sarin gas and Steve picks Grace up from school because he knows she’ll be getting out soon and there will be nobody waiting for her? That’s something that you can bet means the world to Danny, because Grace is his world. ALSO, Steve goes to get Grace and deliver her to the hospital personally, even though it’s a ridiculously busy day with two cases to work at once, one of which might lead them to Wo Fat, the killer of Steve’s father, which is Steve’s Huge Tragic Backstory and the thing he’ll usually drop anything else for. Except Grace! (Obviously, if he knew when Grace would need to be picked up and hadn’t done anything about it, that would have been a huge dick move, so you could say he had no choice, but that still means that 1) he knows when and where to pick Grace up in the first place, which shows he cares enough to pay attention to something that he couldn’t have known would ever be relevant until that moment, and 2) he could have sent Chin or Kono or Jenna or Duke or Kamekona or random HPD officers, and he did not do that. He went there in person. He went to get Grace.)

Which leads us neatly here: Steve, a guy with virtually no family left except for one very estranged sister (and an aunt we don’t know about yet and a mother who’s actually still alive, but those can’t really be counted at the end of season 1), is a HUGE FAMILY MAN. What’s Danny’s whole reason for uprooting his life and being miserable five days a week but still feeling it’s totally worth it for those other two days? LOVE OF FAMILY. Danny definitely, 100% can appreciate that quality in other people, and Steve has it, he just had nowhere to direct it for the longest time.

In the same vein, Danny is a True Dad. He sees Steve, this lonely guy who just lost his dad, and in the fandom it’s generally acknowledged that Steve saw Danny and went “yes, this one, I’m keeping this one”, but for all of Danny’s complaining, he also adopted Steve on the spot.Steve needs a Danny so he doesn’t get himself killed (the very first episode immediately hammers this point home really hard), and there’s no way Danny isn’t aware of that on some level.

Also just. Yes, Steve does a lot of things Danny tells him he shouldn’t do. Yes, Steve is an idiot sometimes. But he also listens to the things Danny yells at him, and when it really matters to Danny, he changes his behavior. There’s that apology hotel room, for one, but there’s also that bit in the episode about Meka, Danny’s former partner, where Steve is not entirely convinced that Meka wasn’t a dirty cop even though Danny keeps insisting he can’t have been because he was a good guy, and Danny gets so mad Steve doesn’t believe him that he walks off (“If my word is not good enough for you, then I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says), so a while later Steve goes after him and he keeps asking questions until he understands what Danny means - you know your partner, you trust your partner, the way Danny trusts Meka is the way Steve trusts Danny and that’s why Danny’s behavior makes sense - and from that point on, he fully has Danny’s back in this crusade to clear Meka’s name, even though there it’s not like there’s suddenly more hard evidence to support it.

So why would Danny ditch Rachel to go chase after Steve? Well, because he knows at that point, no one else might do it, and at least not the unrelenting way Danny will. Because Steve doesn’t have many people and deserves to have someone stick up for him. Because there is zero doubt Steve would do the same thing for him.Because Danny knows that in that moment, Steve needs him more than Rachel does. Because he has to make a choice and he’s inevitably going to regret not being there for one of these people, but apparently, to Danny, getting to Steve is more urgent. Because he’s putting Steve’s needs before his own. Because they’re partners and they’re family and they’re friends and that really, really means something. Because it’s Steve, and he means something.

[isitandwonder]

Have been a charmie and at some point you stopped shipping them? I’m curious, why did it happen? If that’s the story actually... 😘

Hey nonnie, I’ve never called myself a charmie, I find this monicer rather ridiculous - but I did ship A/T and I still read a few authors who write for that ship... but I’m not super passionate about it or invested in it anymore, that’s true.

Why?

Because it stopped being fun and became a toxic cult.

You know, in the beginning (for me that was late summer 2017) T and A seemed rather cute together. They were goofy, had chemistry, they were kinda opposites (Tim lanky and dark and the newby, Armie tall, muscled, more experienced in the business), they were in this movie together that looked beautiful so... why not ship them?

Shipping, to me, means imagining two people being together and writing stories about it, chatting with friends, making stuff up, joking around and fantasize a little. It’s not real but something I imagine. And it’s being taken with a wink, with humor. Everyone involved knows it’s made up shit. And as long as it stays in fan spaces, I don’t see any harm done.

Well, that is not the case anymore.

So called fans or ‘shippers’ (they don’t ship, they KNOW, therefore the air quotes) harrass the real life partners and friends and associates and business partners of A and T. That is one thing I really don’t like. Keep stuff in fan spaces fgs!

But these people also harrass fellow fans who don’t agree with them. Like, wish them or their kids death, call them homophobes, call them all kinds of names, try to dox and mob them. Why should I be in a fandom that’s so full of hate and toxicity? I don’t have time for shit like that.

I still follow a few people on here who get it (you know who you are) but it becomes increasingly hard to find them.

That abyssmal state of the fandom shows esp in a field that’s really important to me and that I usually enjoy most: fan fic. I only still read about 5 authors. About half the people writing for the fandom are part of this toxic swamp I try to avoid like the plague (can we still say that?) on here and I wouldn’t touch their stories with a ten foot pole if you paid me money. Most of the other stories circle around things that simply don’t interest me or explore issues for the umpteenth time. I’m not saying that’s bad - write what the hell you like, create the 100th high school AU, whatever - but it just bores me (that is my problem. I also remeber a time when we had so much variety and creativity... go take a look at the older stories from 2017/2018, there are some true gems to be found!). It’s also a small fandom and maybe that’s the reason it becomes rather apparent that 80% of all WIPs get abandoned? Which is disappointing for a reader (I might be guilty of that as well, I don’t blame the writes, I blame the general atmosphere of this fandom that’s becoming less and less inspiring). I guess that only reflects the state of the fandom in general.

When ‘fans’ or ‘shippers’ are more into the private lives of the folks they stan (which might seem ‘natural’ for a real person ship but crosses a line when it’s carried into these peoples’ real lives), up to the point where it becomes harrassment, delusional, crazy, dangerous, rude, insulting, embarrassing and destructive, instead of supporting their faves - then it’s no wonder that this negativity creeps into other parts of fandom, driving writers and creators away.

(I recently came about a post re Tim where I had to read in the tags that he’s a great actor and that it’s sad that he has such a terrible fan base; that hurt.)

It has come to the point where I’m embarrassed to be associated with this ship - due to the very vocal delusional bunch of so-called ‘fans’ who are only interested in how much dick T gets from A. Like, for real REAL. In this fandom, a big chunk of people truly belief to KNOW that A and T are fucking like rabbits, that A will get a divorce soon (apparently since 2017; what are these people even hoping for???) and that T will only live for his daddy’s dick after that. And they go to ANY length to state and proof this and shout everyone down who might disagree. (Maybe they should masturbate a bit more to get these highly sexualized fantasies out of their systems? It also shows a lot about them, the way they view gender and sexuality, how they assign roles in this ship and what kind of behaviour/personality traits they depict over and over again. I could go on about the blatant, toxic heteronormativity that shows in this gay ‘ship’ that pretends to support LGB sexualities but this is already way too long lol).

I mean, if you want to rearrange your life around something like this - knock yourself out. It’s just not for me. There was a point I was really disappointed about these developments. Then I was angry for a few ‘bad apples’ destroying a place I loved. Now I only laugh about these people, though with some I really have pity because you can see in their posts how hard these mostly young, heterosexual women project  and that they truly have issues in their lives they should rather tackle instead of harrassing some other women on the internet who have the privilege to share the beds of the people they pretend to stan for real.

Oh, but it’s absolutely no use to talk to these so-called hardcore charmie ‘shippers’ - they are so deep down the rabbit whole they can’t and won’t come out of it or even listen. If you only say you don’t care who A or T are into for real you are a traitor, an anti, a homophobe, dumb as shit, dense, blind... That’s not a fun place in this fandom.

I mean, I was tempted to believe, too, for about 4 weeks late 2017. I was drawn intot hat dynamic of being privy to some insider info, feeling important, being in the know... But I’m so glad I was told that Liz was in Crema almost all the time during the filming - so the little stories A and T told were promo and nothing more. That was my moment of waking up. It took me like three days to come to terms with the fact that all I imagined was truly only a fantasy - but I’m so grateful I accepted that early on and was spared a lot of disappontment by that. I know a lot of people who weren’t so lucky and are now spending their days spinning more and more delusional theories to keep the world they built together...

Rn I see huge parts of the fandom trying to ‘disprove’ things they won’t belief or accept because it goes against their ‘knowledge’ of ‘what’s really going on’. So much energy goes into arguing that posts are fake and people lie etc etc. I can’t keep up with all this nonsense. And why should I? This is not fun. This is madness. This is negativity. This is destructive. Besides, most proofs are tarot readings and the analysis of pics and vids taken out of context (or are even manips). But I suppose these people find some kind of validation in their behavior? It just eludes me. I’ve deleted most of my fics, blocked and unfollowd almost everyone, and be warned, if you have charmie in your header that’s a sign for me to keep my distance...

But all of this is only my opinion, you are welcome to disagree, carve your own happy place out here, do as you please. I would never go on anyone’s blog to lecture them or police them but you asked so here’s what I have to say.

[makiema]

Hello! What makes you ship Levi and Eren? (always curious about how people get into ereri)

Hi there, anon! I wish I could’ve answered this briefly but you’ve asked me something that I could honestly ramble on about forever. I’d try to be precise but I’m afraid it’d still be quite long because I don’t have the time to summarise, so bear withe me please >.

Okay so first of all, I used to be more into Eremika than Ereri in the beginning and the precious Eremika moment from Chapter 50 owned my heart. Back then the 13 y/o me didn’t get shit about Levi and Eren’s platonic canon relationship. But the popularity of Ereri was overwhelming and even though they were far from being my OTP I still shipped them in AU settings mainly because the fanfics were excellent. Also, at that point of time, I was more invested in the Naruto fandom and SS was my only OTP. In fact, I didn’t even know about the Visual Novel until late 2015 or early 2016 (I don’t remember exactly) which made me really get into Ereri. Reading the VN actually changed my whole perspective on Ereri and made me realise the depth of their canon relationship. When I re-read the manga again after that none of their subtle moments were lost on me and that’s how the ship started growing on me. Since then I even began picking up on a lot of parallels, symbolisms, etc. associated with them and all of that collectively went into becoming the reason why Ereri is my OTP.

I probably cannot think up of everything that makes me ship them at one go. Also I have my internals next week and Im losing my mind. Anyway here are some of the reasons that immediately came to mind when I saw your ask:

• Levi equating Eren to “The Tyger” : The VN concluded with the first two stanzas of Blake’s poem “The Tyger”. The poem is taken from The Songs of Innocence and Experience and the entire volume focuses on two things : the transition from childhood into adulthood and the existence of both beneficial and malevolent forces in human beings. So in the novel, Levi’s understanding, acceptance and even admiration of both the humane and the monstrous potential in Eren is commendable : “A monster with perfect, fearsome beauty; that inspires awe” Also, Levi acknowledges Eren’s will that “cannot be made to surrender” and his drive for freedom that “people living like birds in cages won’t get”. This shows us how Levi realizes that Eren’s mental maturity is not that of a normal 15 yo; that his “experiences” have made him into someone much more gritty, resilient and strong-willed for his age. “The Tyger” here is the agent of free-will and the poem further emphasises on free spirit by incorporating references to mythological figures who’re deemed as humanity’s heroes, for instance, “seize the fire” refers to Prometheus who is mankind’s hero because he stole fire from Zeus. It is said that because of him mankind could gain knowledge ; that mankind could step out of the bounds of ignorance ( See the parallel with Eren who said how ignorance is the biggest obstacle to freedom in Chapter 112 ). Another hero alluded to in the poem is Icarus who grew his wings of freedom and attempted to reach the farthest point (dangerously close to the sun) even though he was burned in the attempt (parallels with Eren’s whole attitude of ‘no matter what kind of hell awaits me I’ll keep moving forward’ ). Yeah so, that’s how deep Levi’s understanding of Eren runs.( Can you imagine the entire arc of Eren’s character was foreshadowed in Levi’s thoughts about him?) To me understanding is the most important factor when it comes to a ship so, I think Levi’s pov in the VN is the biggest contributor to their development.

• The way Eren looks at Levi : Idk how cliched this sounds but yes, the way he looks at Levi honestly gives me life. Be it in the Forest of the Giant Trees, or in the Reiss Chapel or in the Marley Arc, his eyes say it all. Add to this his signature shaky way of saing “Captain?”, idk if it’s only me but that just carries so much feeling, so much angst, so many unspoken emotions right there. If Levi’s thoughts on Eren made me fall in love with Ereri in the first place then Eren’s body language when it comes to Levi made me fuckin smitten over them (i kid u not honestly this ship is one of the very few things that actually give me the will to live)

• Hope and Strength : Honestly, I love Levi and Eren’s roles as humanity’s strength and humanity’s hope because this actually speaks volumes about their relationship. If Erwin gave Levi’s strength a dimension then Eren gave his strength meaning. Their roles in canon show their inter-dependence. After all, what is strength without hope? I don’t remember who first pointed this out, but someone said that this is the very concept the Survey Corps logo alludes to. The Wings of Freedom are shown as blue and white because royal blue represents strength and white represents hope. So the Wings are symbolical of what Levi and Eren individually stand for as well as signifies their dependence on each other.

• Levi’s role as Eren’s guardian : I love him both as Eren’s protector and his mentor. (oh also let’s not forget Eren had a little crush on him,,how adorable 🥺)

We’ve seen Levi giving it his all to protect Eren multiple times. And when he couldn’t protect him during the Battle of Trost because of his injury we see him clenching his fists in frustration. Again, in RTS we see Levi quite baffled when Erwin orders him to protect the horses and not protect Eren. Also in the RTS when Eren got flung on top of the wall, Levi was visibly concerned and then when Erwin couldnt come up with a plan that’d guarantee their survival, he quickly suggested that BOTH Erwin and Eren flit from there. This goes on to show how Levi thinks Erwin and Eren are EQUALLY important for ensuring humanity’s survival. It is evident from here that his liege and his mentee both belong on the same pedestal and he’d do anything to save them. Levi similarly comes up with an abrupt suggestion again in Ch 112 to save Eren when the Soldiers informed him that the higher authorities plan on having Eren eaten. Even though he clearly disapproved of Eren’s actions in Liberio, even though Levi himself always adhered to rules and discipline, he still had faith in Eren and he’d never accept such a ridiculous order, even if it came from Pixis. (plus he remembers the first time he met Eren which sort of makes us realize that Levi still sees himself as Eren’s protector🥺)

Next comes Levi’s role as a mentor in Eren’s life. I think his words of advice to Eren is an important factor that made him the man he is today. Levi encouraged him to believe in himself, he acknowledged his willpower, appreciated his relentless drive for freedom and even goaded him on to make important choices by himself. The recent happenings in the manga made a lot of people say that Eren follows the principle of “the end justifies the means” but originally, to quote Levi: “nobody can dictate you on what is the right path or what is the wrong one till you arrive at a certain outcome resulting from your choice”. I think one of the major reasons why Levi kicked Eren in the Marley arc again was because the outcome that Eren caused (at least according to Levi and the SC) was making Paradis the enemy of the whole enemy of the world and also a mountain of civilian deaths. This is just head canon but I think Levi was mainly disappointed because Eren didn’t seek his approval (unlike in the Reiss Chapel incident where he urged Levi to have faith in him before jumping into action of his own volition). Him comparing Eren with the underground thugs also makes me assume that he was genuinely hurt because he thought Eren has become complacent to the point where he doesn’t see Levi as a mentor anymore. But, right after his voice trails with the “you too..”, we see Eren looking up at him with the same beaming eyes. Curious why he’d do that at that instant. Also, during Serum Bowl, Eren used his height as the trump card to tower upon Levi. It was the only time he actually defied Levi and he did manage to look 100 percent domineering. But, post time skip Eren grew in leaps and bounds and he could easily repeat that but HE DID NOT. In fact, he utters his usual “Captain..?” and his eyes also have the same look. So maybe he still sees Levi as his inspiration but he cannot express that because he’s in a bind and has to act distant and cold with everyone. After all in Chapter 121, in the memory panel, we did see him recalling that very moment when Levi first advised him on making independent choices. His role as the mentor in Eren’s life is therefore once again reinforced by Isayama and I think that adds substantially to their wonderful platonic dynamic.                                        ____________xxx___________

I probably couldn’t fit them all and even this is a terrible briefing. It is all so disarrayed and incoherent. I didn’t even get the time to attach pictures. Ugh, I’m so sorry anon ;-; I wish Uni would spare me some time to rant properly about my precious babies >.

[yurireview]

The Hypocrisy of the argument "this ship is forced"

Lately I have realized that a part of the fandom is very hypocritical when they say "this ship is forced" because they only apply it when the couple is (lesbian)

Now that the BB is almost canon, they are very scared and they are throwing shit to Whiterose (when they did not do it before) because they are realizing that this volume they have had a lot of focus ... but let's analyze which are the ship forced and that the fandom would not say anything if it becomes "canon".

I remember that the video that made me think that most of Straight ship with Weiss were forced was this:

do not get me wrong (I know that Calix is super positive, multishipper and one of the best youtuber of RWBY) ... but in that video as his teammate Hunter pointed out, she had to create a fanfic so that the dynamics of Weiss and Neptune worked, even ignoring many things established in the canon.

Now let's look at the date (2017) even with the latest volumes and with all the character development of Weiss ... there are people who want Weiss to be with Neptune (not because they like the couple) but because they want the Whiterose not to be a canon couple,,,but there are others who would not call that "forced"

let's look at a more updated case of one of my favorite youtuber (not that he is talking badly about Whiterose ... but sometimes even the "experts" get more stupid arguments for "normal" ship)

When I read this, I said to myself, Really? Weiss and Jaune in 6 volumes have only had 9 minutes on screen (most were in the first 2 volumes) where she rejected him in a very cruel way ... then when she at least became his friend (almost did not talk whit him)

in fact the moments that could at least give them "development" made Weiss focused on Ruby.

The end of Vol 5 is a clear example where Weiss did not dedicate 1 minute of his time to Jaune (or even to thank him)

Not to mention the Vol 6 ... I mean literally this was Weiss in that Vol (no development or even talk with Jaune)

It's sad that even Blake was more affective with Jaune than Weiss ... but still there are people who say "Weiss and Jaune are going to end up together". Where do they get that from? In what universe would that ship not be forced?

I mean even the argument of the "big family" is ridiculous (taken from a fanfic) ... first that works best with Ruby and Weiss for 2 simple reasons:

Ruby is the person who brings more happiness to Weiss (that's undeniable) ... so Weiss does not need Jaune because the show itself establishes it that way.

In family dynamics ... Tai is the opposite of Jacques and really the "loving family" does not work ... because like Jaune sister (Ruby and Weiss would have to move since you can not live with their parents forever)

I've even seen people who ship Weiss and Sun on Reddit (even on Tumblr and some are Bumbleby fans who for some reason promote this so the fandom will forget the Blakesun)

They prefer that Weiss be with Sun (they say that the Ship has "Potential) I mean WTF ... they prefer that to Weiss not being straight 

literally they only have 2 minutes to talk, zero development, zero interest ... it's literally the same example as with Neptune but worse (you'd have to create a fanfic and clearly make Weiss act out of character because as we can see his link is with Ruby and this volume made it clearer) ... if that is not "forced"  then I do not know what it is.

I'll clarify something before they misunderstand me ... we all have the freedom to match couples what we want, it's the beauty of the shipping...but if you come with those ship that are bad (objectively speaking) you have no right to say that another ship with development, time on screen and that the narrative gives meaning is "forced"

Literally the only straight ship that at least would not be "forced" if they give more development would be the Lancaster ... in fact the Lancaster is similar to the Whiterose with the difference that it has less screen time, less important moments.

But it's still a thousand times better than the other Weiss straight pairings 

The fandom and the Whiterose

Even though the Whiterose is one of the most popular ship of RWBY and with better development still there are people who say "forced" if the ship becomes canon

Literally the Whiterose is the ship with more time on screen 

the new official RWBY manga that is telling the same story of the show (but more developed) is giving the Whiterose a very special and clear focus giving very obvious moments in this dynamic

Not only this ship has more time on screen than all the others ... but it is evident how the Weiss character has become so close to Ruby (as it never was with another character)

Many of the moments between Weiss and Ruby had happened between Weiss and a guy many of the fandom would say "are canon" or they would say "Weiss is starting to feel something for that guy" without hesitation

In addition to each volume its dynamic is changing ... but still there are people who say "this is forced" "are putting agenda" or "The Bumbleby is already canon... why they want to transform a straight character into homosexual?"

Weiss is as "straight" as Blake or Yang

Monty video on this subject is quite clear ... it does not matter if the couple is “straight or homosexual" if they have development in the narrative then it's fine (part of being young is "self-discovery")

For something the BB is almost canon, because events led them to develop feelings (it's simple) to classify them as "straight" is silly and Monty himself clarifies it there

So stop saying nonsense like

"The Whiterose can not happen because ...she straight"  "The Whiterose is forced not like the straight ship of the show" "They can not develop anything because if not everyone in the RWBY team would be lesbians and that would be supporting political agenda"

I hope you liked this review ... saying this I say goodbye and I wish you good day

[idio-cies]

My Thoughts on S7

Okay first things first.

Atm my emotions are mixed. I am angry, disappointed, confused and happy all at once.

I don’t think that this was a bad/terrible season per ce but there were definitely different elements in it that rubbed me the wrong way.

These guys can never catch a fucking break can they?

I’ll do plot points/devices before I go into characters because... whoooooo

Okay so like, the beginning of the season was actually pretty damn good, the road trip episode (episode 2) was really fun, it was making me laugh and it wasn’t too out of the narrative, it laid the ground for the fact that going into the rift and such messed up time (I thought it would). Then the family feud episode was ehh... and there was a couple of other things that you felt were steering the season downhill. And then the flashback episodes happen and that’s when you knew everything went out the window and into the pot.

Look, I’m not usually one of those people who doubt or anything at the crew. heck I gave them a chance at still showing themselves after I watched LoK which I hated. I did. There was something about LoK that made me feel so weird and it was because of how poor it was, after the flashback episodes I began to get that same feeling. That is not good, though  was still hyperventilating over the fact that the new season was out and Earth was in danger etc etc. I am just disappointed in the crew. It always starts out pretty good and then goes to shit. (well actually S4-6 was all over the place).

So Plot points. The Earth being in danger? I knew that would happen, it is a dark thing, it was about war. Sendak wanted to exploit their vulnerabilities. It makes sense due to the fact that Sendak was Haggar’s puppet. Hence why we see that white alternative Voltron Robeast at the end that turns out to be an Altean powering it. 1 altean manning that was like fucking incredible though. That cliffhanger sets up something with Allura. I was saddened when it looked like that Altean business was swept under the rug in that episode with Kolivan. I knew Haggar would then be involved with the other Alteans but damn she works fast. That episode with Kolivan did hint that it’s not going to be over for them in deep space. This opens up so many things... Hopefully (I’m finding myself saying that a lot now in response to this show). Anyways, yeah. The next person to take down is Haggar and I’ve always been on board with the idea that Allura will go 1-on-1 with her because it was awesome what we saw of Allura in S2 with her alchemy and it will be a chance to show how much Allura has learnt about herself. Allura is the one connected by the way. That’s telling enough. It was just her in that end scene, no other paladins. I want this to be her battle.

Enslavement? who saw that coming as soon as earth was under attack *raises hand*. It was obvious. I was actually surprised with the technology that Earth managed to create, I know it was because it was because of Altean functions etc, but they actually achieved it, like what the hell. Also the setting. So do people think this is in the future or an alternate reality of our current Earth? because Veronica said about WWIII and I place my bets on alternate reality. Plus it would be quaint with Voltron and all that jazz.

There were some plot points that were just like really?? like, I think I speak for the entire fandom that was happened with Adam was shit. As soon as Sam said they were doomed I was like “Oh no, this isn’t going to end well.” but they didn’t even give us the decency to see his ship blow up, only to see his tag go red like, shit man, why did you play us dirty like this? It is suspicious that that happened, but after everything I highly doubt Adam is alive. I just want to say though. That device of when a character is killed off screen, well that either can tell you that they are irrelevant to the story (like Lady Macbeth in Macbeth) or it can be because the scene holds weight to it. Not too much, but some, and that scene I didn’t feel anything, just a void. I knew he was doomed.

Overall with the plot in he second half, again it was one thing after another. I have to say though, it wasn’t as rushed to me as it has been previously. Thing is, that just seems to be the way of vld now; it’s rushed. One thing after another and these guys really do not get a break whatsoever.

I thought we would see a little more Romelle, but just like everything, vld seems to not have the time to do stuff like that.

Okay the amount of parallels to S1 was ridiculous. It puts my theory forward but I find it hilarious because S1 is the better season. The parallels are important. i spotted ep 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11. There was other parallels to other seasons but those parallels are really important to me for my theory on things repeating. And guess what, that happened with Hunk! For others it is a mixture of arcs (Pidge, Keith and Allura) and for Lance it is a repeat as well, with Keith. I can’t believe that that theory is the one thing that still stands from S4 onwards, I kinda feel proud.

I also want to say how many fucking rainbows there were this season. They were everywhere!!!! When my hope did fleet for a second, I did think “are the rainbows what the crew meant by LGBT rep?” because, what the actual fuck. They were everywhere. I don’t know whether people agree with me, but in the fights I still saw the Bi colours, especially against the robeast at the end... and there was a scene with Lance when they were out of commission. I believe it was the scene where Veronica was calling for Lance, there was the Bi colours there. The blue on his suit and outside was prominent and the purple from the blasts and the red in blue looked oddly pink, it was so fucking weird. It may be wishful thinking and the quality was not great, but the colours were there I’m almost certain of it. I don’t know whether anyone is with me in that though?

So characters.

I’ll start with Pidge.

There wasn’t much over her character this season, but she has her whole family reunited. Okay, right Pidge is not very popular rn, but like Sam telling Colleen that their Children are “strong like their mother” moved me. At least they display that. I liked Colleen actually, I really did. Sam’s command was cool to see but Matt arriving home? He gave me soooo many Edward Elric vibes like wtf. Pidge was her usual, just at least she wasn’t digging at Lance the entire season.

Hunk

I think it's safe for me to say that everyone was fairly happy with Hunk getting some more attention? I was happy with what Keith told him on earth and the display or growth he showed when floating around in space. It was really cool and gives us a firm point that he too has had growth, it wasn't just in S1. It was lovely to see, though I still have some things I'm not so happy about, I'll come back to that later. But yeah. Hunk’s arc(s?) in this season were actually heart warming to see. Hunk kept the team together which is something that makes sense with his character, though the sticking together thing can be shown with Shiro and Lance? But yeah. That scene with him working through anxiety was actually really nice. Then later with his parents, it hit me in the feels. Then what Keith tells him was so sweet because it was so lovely to see something 1 on 1 with Hunk because he never gets that, I wonder if his siblings(??) are okay, we only saw his parents...

Shiro

So, despite the injustice of Adam, Shiro taking the captain role... I knew that would happen and I’m happy it did. The white lion thing? Yeah, that was Atlas. That was really nice too, it really was just let down by a few things and it was all to do with relationships. Okay, right I know Keith and Shiro get a lot of screen time and stuff but after that first episode it was like it went *poof* like episode 1 didn’t even happen which I thought was highly strange, I was expecting to see more of their dynamic but I guess not. Then of course there was the Adam stuff, I almost wept in the last episode where Shiro was talking and it honed in on Adam’s plaque and Shiro was saying something about sunlight. Urgh, just kill me now. Then finally, I did think something would be suggested with Lance but nope, nothing. I knew Lance’s arc and Shiro’s help wouldn’t happen this season but I’d found so much that suggest it, even in the newer seasons and I thought it would still run in S7 as a hint, nope nothing. I still think Lance was hung up over Shiro and such in the first episode, but like overall? We didn’t even see Shiro in with Lance’s lion. Lance either had Romelle or... well, nothing...

I knew Sendak would be Shiro’s to take down. Makes sense with the 0109 and 0104 parallel. Oh wait! In that case, I did think when I saw that fight scene with Sendak, I did think of how Shiro was protecting Lance at the time, so that could be a hint because it was a throwback, but I’m not sure.

Allura

Okay Allura fucking confused me this season. Though it was cool seeing her royalty badge slip, she is becoming her own person, a paladin of Voltron. Not just Allura, Princess, Daughter of King Alfor. It’s all about her legacy arc and finding that she can be her own person, not just live for the purpose of her father, that she is also not alone in everything. The thing is, some of those things are who Allura are, it’s just she needs to find that balance. Her authority in this season stood out to me for some reason. Like, she still had a voice, but it wasn’t her usual one of her place of being royalty. Allura is still finding herself. The Alteans plot line is for her, always has been, always will be. Her royalty title is a strange one, and it would feel like she is reverting back to it, but she’s not, because that is one of her titles and she is good at that, she is still a teenager bless her and like I keep saying, she is still finding herself, she doubts herself too. We were told in a review that Allura and Hunk were the ones with the arcs, but Allura’s was very subtle. It was basically leading to her last arc, but she did give up her royalty title when she threw her crown on the floor and gave up the crystal. Also guys, Allura’s arc is weird when you add in Lance, like her having feelings for him now is so fucked up? and in the next season I’m waiting for there to be a break. I will talk a bit more about this when I get to Lance because it will be easier, but yeah. I love Allura and I want her arc to be of justice and she is so close, but I find it ssooooo very interesting that the two characters with most of the character development left to undertake are Lance and Allura and this can go one of two ways; their arcs respectively end up making them grow together to be better or they end up growing a part. When I get to Lance, I can tell you which one it will be.

Keith

Keith's growth really does show, but it’s super weird right? I was right about things still needing some time with Krolia, though I thought there would be more too it that would end up with more angst but I was wrong. I was wrong and right about a lot of things... Anyway, I was expecting there to be something more there with the build-up to Keith calling Krolia Mum/Mom, I head-cannoned something that I thought might work with Adam and Shiro in respect to this (forgiveness and acceptance) but that flew waayyyyyy out the window and into an electrified fence. Anyway, so a little disappointed about that, though I knew it would arrive and I still was on the brink of tears when I saw it because like, this is Keith we’re talking about. So I was right with Keith and creating firmer bonds with the others, except there are two gaps. Allura and Lance. Keith and Hunk was the “pair we haven’t seen in a while”- I knew it would be those pairs from 0209-10 or klance in ref. to 0107, and I was almost there, except Klance was fucking weird (I’ll get to that later). Keith and Hunk was actually really fucking sweet like omg. Keith still being closed off with his arms, but slowly coming out of the shadows and being open was so... urgh, it was lovely to see and it’s something that I wanted to see. Shiro and him is just the norm now, but like I said with Shiro, I thought it were weird that it was just dropped after ep 1. Then Keith and Pidge, I mean, not anywhere near Hunk and Keith displayed, but it paralleled Klance which was so... weird. I’m glad but confused because of what I’ve said before about the parallel theory I have, but Pidge and Keith were still working together, Keith got it quicker as well. I just thought it was super weird how Pidge had almost literally turned into Lance. I’m so confused by it because I can’t tell if it’s a good or a bad thing...

So anyways, if we stay on the topic of Keith and his bonds with people, he referenced the friendship thing in 5th(?) episode when they were floating around in Space. That whole scene was... ummm yeah, very telling. Keith hurt Allura, Allura hurt Keith and then Lance was hurting Keith and Keith was hurting Lance. It was complicated. Allura and Keith have always been patchy and they need to work on it. the forgiveness in S2 was super weird because it was one-sided and then Keith didn’t want her to lecture him in S4, leaving where they are with things is because of Keith. Keith was the one to dig at Allura first and Allura bit back. Yeah, that is something they need to work on. Keith apologises to them all, though it wasn’t individual, plus he goes on to be good with Hunk and Pidge later on. I feel like Keith needed to apologise to Allura separately, like he also needed to do in S2... Then with Lance... Lance was hurt because of the actions, not what was said. Lance started to perk up only when Allura called out Keith for leaving. I don’t think Lance added to that because of his ties with Allura, otherwise he would have said something first, but he said about Keith leaving twice, it hurt him differently and was separate from Allura. I mean, I’m sure there was an element of Lance sticking up for Allura, but yeah, he wouldn’t have said what he said if it was just for her, it was personal. Plus, (yes I will still listen to the crew) one of the crew said that Keith leaving hurt Lance specifically. I stand by this because the narrative we have been shown doesn’t make sense other wise, we wouldn’t have seen Lance be so isolated etc when Keith was away. Keith’s interactions with Lance were weird, but I’ll talk about that later. But still. Keith, if he explores romance (it would make sense with the bonds he has made; parental, brotherly, friendship etc) he seems to be super bad at it (again, I’ll get into that later)... but yeah, he needs to patch things with Allura and Lance because I think they will show that he has a unique bond with each of them, plus Voltron is like “The Keith show” now, so it would be stupid if they didn’t patch it.

So, lets talk about Axca and Keith. I’m sorry I crack up every time I think about this because of how devoid Keith is. It is fucking hilarious. Thank god someone officially said in a review that it was one-sided because it so totally is. So first. The bonding moment, that came up 3 times. 1st with Krolia, though this was never shown to have a reaction shot, and was basically the “Keith” in that situation, plus context was all different. Then we had Ezor and Zethrid. Ezor is meant to parallel Lance, but Ezor has the fond look on her face, but the words said and such was meant to parallel the bonding moment, no doubt. Though, it did feel like a joke... The whole Ezor and Zethrid thing was weird-up from the very beginning. Then we arrive with Axca and she says “It brought me to you” meaning Keith, I full on cackled. Keith’s face is devoid, he makes no discrepancies of what she really means and it is so funny because omfg. his “reaction shot” isn’t even a reaction. There was no weight to it whatsoever. This is what I’m getting at. The bonding moment held a lot of weight because of all the elements, the lighting, the music, the looks, everything- but also because it was reciprocated. Ezor and Zethrid was blatant because it was reciprocated but Krolia and the Axca, it wasn’t. I would be concerned if Keith had said something in return or even a fond look or maybe even surprise like “OOHHHH you meant like that”- but it didn’t... there was nothing. There wasn’t the same music. Then that end scene where Axca comes to the grave??? I was so confused and my thoughts were “Ohhhh you’re gonna be disappointed” because it was all from Axca’s side. Keith suggested nothing, even when he fought to help Axca, nothing, he was being Keith in that moment. Their whole “relationship” just seemed to be like “I hate being indebted to someone, so I’ll help you and that’s it” also, when they meet Keith was starting his arc really... I mean, there is weight to their relationship but I find it so funny because I don’t see an ounce of romantic reciprocation from Keith. Keith makes absolutely no effort to be fond or anything, except to Lance, and then when he checked out Rolo. That is the thing that makes me live. Keith making all those fond looks and such at Lance and their dynamic in S1 and S3 matched with all the tropes in S2, it doesn’t make sense. Keith is gay. I really do still believe that.

Okay, so Lance.

I am disappointed, I was depressed about it all but now I am riding on something. So you know how Lance is like the Sokka incarnate? Yeah, I think they’re gonna pull a Sokka. I mean, I really thought about it and I was like, well I wasn’t 100% happy about the Sokka arc but at least his insecurities were handled and such, though some things were left rather late. Sokka had the meteorite sword and he took a whole episode trying to master it, it was all about his insecurities as well, there was a sense about him that was totally serious and now I can’t help but think of Lance. I believe it was Joaquim who said Lance’s arc is subtle and his favourite. Well, if that’s so (and it is subtle) they will do him justice and have things handled. In the family feud episode, I was not happy, but they referenced Space mall and The Depths a lot. The depths (if any have read that post I did) made me hopeful. The family feud episode felt like a huge dig at Lance and it totally was. For over half of it, he was the centre of attention. I may talk about that episode separately as there is a lot on it, but I do have acceptance over it, though I do feel cheated and annoyed. But yeah. Sokka ended up helping his father in the war, so it will be slightly different. I haven’t watch ATLA in ages, but I know that Sokka’s father called him a good man or something, and that was all Sokka wanted to hear as he did have to grow up quickly in his water tribe, but because of that, he exerted that child-like goofy behaviour. He didn’t have any bending skills, but he got by with his instincts and tactics (sound familiar). Lance feels like he doesn’t bring anything, but his growth relies on him to use instincts and tactics. This is shown with Keith putting his faith in Lance and Lance looks so lost almost every time (expect the drone shooting, that was weird) and then when Lance accepted his death, it makes my heart hurt to think about it. He gave up. It is a parallel to the Keith scene in 0605. He gave up on himself and Red saved him. If anything, that puts Klance further forward. You know what though? you would have thought Lance would have fought a losing battle to get his sister to safety, but he didn’t. That’s what hit me the most. Their teams would have lost important members respectively, they would have lost without them, plus their family would have lost two members. I can’t believe Lance let himself give up. It really does show how troubled he is deep down. After the impression we get from Lance, fighting to save someone he has known for all of 10 minutes and then lunges at Ezor to not get to Pidge though he was tied up and then not even make an effort to save his sister? What was that? WHAT WAS THAT. That’s what made me cry. I knew that Red wouldn’t activate with the others. you could see it coming. Then Red saves him, yet it was a huge surprise because, usually when Keith was saved by Red we always saw Red glow. I still have hope for Klance, and this scene is one of the reasons why. That context of Red saving Lance and it being a huge fucking surprise, yep, i just.

I will say it once and I will say it now. Lance did not get an arc this season. Why? Well, it actually wasn’t stated that he would, but the groundwork is still there. At this rate, they are just dragging Lance face-first through the mud. If they don’t give him an arc it would be a huuugggeee injustice to his character. Yes, it was annoying that Hunk got the family arc and not Lance as Lance seemed to be the one hinted at that, but they still put in his insecurities and also how he has not fully connected with his lions. I have so much to say about Lance, so bare with (when do I never?).

Okay so first. The paladins have each had those connection things with their respective lions except Allura individually with Blue and Lance in general. Shiro was the first with Black S2 (?), then Pidge S2, then we saw Keith with black in S6 and S7 again, Allura with the whole of Voltron in S6 and then Hunk in S7. Lance, I know we are riding on trusting what Jeremy and other crew members have told us, but Jeremy said he will connect with his lion. Well, when we had that opportunity like the others, he still hasn’t connected, but Red still saved him and he did use his Bayard 3 times which is a first, though it was never on his own. The first time there was no build up to it which was weird, but it was with Keith and they drew no attention??? Then next with Pidge to get the dual blades which was cool, and there was build-up, then lastly again with Keith and there was build-up there. I don’t think that that is the “connection” Jeremy was talking about, but Lance seems to slowly be getting there.

You know there are loads of people thinking that Lance will be like “nah, I’ll stay on earth, I’m not worthy anyway” when the paladins inevitably have to leave earth again for another space battle. Well, I think I believe that more now than ever. It makes sense, especially after that “I accept my death” scene. Lance is not a stable human and his insecurities are really getting the better of him now. Somebody pointed out, all during the family feud thing “I’m not dumb, I’ll prove it”, straight after: “You know I’m the dumb one” :// I just aaaahhhhhhhh. The Shiro thing... I don’t know whether that will come back, I thought during episode 1 that Lance was still concerned about that, but I’m not sure. But Lance’s insecurities need to be handled, and here’s how A//urance doesn’t make any fucking sense.

You know how I said earlier about Allura and Lance being the ones with the most remaining character development left to go and that could either bring them together or break them apart. Well, here’s some food for thought: Allura is almost there, but Lance isn’t. Why present a romance when a character is at their lowest and doesn’t talk about it whilst the other one is thriving, doesn’t realise the other persons low but continues to grow because of this person if they were meant to be? Absolutely nothing indicates to me that Allura makes Lance feel better about his insecurities. Her presence and such may make him feel better, but that one time Lance faltered in 0302 and let slip some of his doubt in himself Allura told him to go after Red. the one time, now it’s like that never ever happened. The one time Lance lets out his doubts to Allura and she directs him elsewhere? To red no less? I have this theory that Lance prefers the weight of actions over words as no one has ever been able to make him feel better with just words, except Keith, who then proceeded to do an act. Allura directing him to Red was words and actions too, but he was smitten over Allura saving him, but any other time it’s just words and it doesn’t leave a mark, but it does for Allura. This is why A//urance doesn’t make sense. It builds up Allura more than it does Lance and only now is Allura showing any feelings towards Lance and it’s weird. I know that Lance was telling Allura to be safe because of his bias, but then Allura does it and it was weird that Lance didn’t say it first... I don’t get it. Their arcs don’t align, and if people are correct with Lance doubting so much that he will stay on earth, and now Allura is tied back to living Alteans again, the only thing for them to do is drift apart romantically speaking. Like I said with one building up (Allura) and the other staying still (Lance)- it doesn’t make any sense. It would be stupid because it is an injustice to both of their characters. Allura has another path and Lance has another. It would still be what Lance wants and not what he needs.

So lets finally talk about Klance. Okay, they were super weird to me this season, but I still believe in klance, because of what I said above, and more. Look, so lets get something straight(lol). There has been a slight role reversal. It is super weird because they have the dynamic of S3, but Keith is acting like old, closed-off Keith when Lance is being genuine. Keith to me seemed pretty hostile and that in of itself and the fact that he had his arms crossed and such in the family feud episode is enough to tell us that the “rivalry” is not through, and it would be stupid if it was left like that, as they are meant to be friends as Keith said in the 5th episode. It is stupid if they didn’t come to a close about it because it was evident that Keith wasn’t telling the truth, because he was closed off and poked at Lance. I mean, I don’t blame Keith, though when you look at S1 and especially S3 you’re like Huh? because Keith did put faith in Lance, but he was being Shitty towards him too and it was so weird because he wasn’t acting that way with anyone else. Not even James, which I’m sure was meant to be a parallel to Keith and Lance. As James was hostile to Keith when he first saw him and then, by their last interaction James was being cocky and teamed up with him, acting like a friend. I also found it hilarious how James knew exactly who Keith was and Keith in return had no clue, they always honed in on Keith and his face just read “I feel like I know you but I just can’t put my finger on it”- you would think of all the people in the Garrison that he would remember James, but nope.

Does anybody else feel like everyone falls away when Keith and Lance have moments? Like in S3, they frame their moments so it looks like they’re alone? Well they still do that in this season. So, first scene was when Keith goes to help Axca and leaves Lance in charge. Literally everyone walks past them and Lance turns around and gets Keith to turn around (lol, thats a visual trope) and Lance’s face screams that he has never had this much faith put on him, I mean, Allura, Shiro and Krolia were there and then Coran as well, this was everyone and Lance was put in charge of leading them all out safely. I think especially because Shiro was now there you would think Shiro got the lead, or it be a shared responsibility. But Lance’s face, bless his heart.

Then we have the drone thing where it was literally only them. Keith said not to miss but it was weird. I saw someone say it was like a tease, but I disagree, a little. His facial expression matched with his tone didn’t suggest that, but Lance made no reaction, so it might have not phased him, he didn’t miss though. But that is a role reversal of 0107. “I’ll distract them, you take the shot” is the equivalent of all the gestures Lance made in 0107. Also Lance’s face is a little confused when Keith says not to miss. Keith wasn’t exactly being hostile, and he wasn’t full-out teasing, it was a bit more like the start of a gag they could have between them, it was super weird. Glad to see the sniper again though (mwahahahaha means his growth bitches).

Then we arrive at family feud and like Lance is so genuine and tentative, his face is all soft and is the same face he makes when speaking about Allura in his vlog and he says that Keith is the future. If that doesn’t make you scream and have hope, I don’t know what will. They voted for each other! I just can’t man. Lance takes the longest to write down who he chooses, Keith takes the shortest and lance comes out saying shit like that. Man, way to puncture my heart. Then Keith is closed off and just says that he doesn’t want to be stuck with Lance, Lance thinking he said something nice though is stupid. 1. it puts across that Lance is dumb (again), 2. It feels like Lance doesn’t listen which doesn’t show his growth. But I’m gonna keep saying this, the fact that there is still clearly a rift between them makes no sense if they were to leave it that way, they will have to work through that. Plus Keith was open to Lance in S3, why throw that all away. Lance was being so open to Keith in S3, now he’s really genuine in comparison to Lance’s facade and rivalry, why squander that. Then the bonding moment, what was the point in having that, paralleling that but it not having the same affect as it did with the other times we saw it, unless you look at the other one that is almost exactly the same with Krolia and Texas. It makes no sense to build something so early on to fuck it up. Their character arcs won’t do it justice if keith also isn’t open and at least friends with Lance, or for Lance to be so insecure about taking up some more leadership roles or just being insecure in general. The fact that Allura and Keith still have a rift between them and so do Lance and Keith is really fucking interesting. Why those two, ohhhhh you don’t think it could be because Lance has always tried to get closer to Allura and now he is and Keith is very fucking confused about Lance now he’s being so genuine about everything. I wonder if Keith is annoyed at Lance. It is meaningful that Keith put that faith in Lance despite Lance looking like a lost puppy.

Guys, the context is still there. The whole time whilst watching and i got to that A//urance scene, I was just confused because the development with Klance otherwise makes no fucking sense. Keith is nowhere near interested in Axca, Lance still is upset about Keith leaving, Lance has insecurities, Lance raises Allura up, though he is still dragging himself down, Keith has a rift and it just happens to be with Allura and Lance, mostly Lance, though he finds it easy to dig at Allura. Those 3 I swear to god. As I said before, as vld now seems to be “The Keith Show” I’m sure those bonds will get sorted. Allura’s arc has been left on a cliffhanger for her to solve and Lance is digging himself a grave it seems. Everyone else seems to be good atm.

Maybe this restored some positivity? maybe not. A few threads of my hope did fleet, but seriously, I’m trying to look at the brighter side of things. It is not fair about the queerbait, I grant you that, and I have a feeling that Lance will be like Sokka and it being rather late and then IF we get Klance, it will be probably like Korrasami... which is a huge shame, but is the only way I see things happening.

Sorry for those who has lost faith and are very disappointed, I’m still disappointed to, but now I’ve arrived at acceptance in some places. sorry for the length

Later Paladudes ;)

[aceprosecuties]

Any reason why you don't like ships like Cykesquill but ship other agencia gap ship like Sheith. I don't see the difference and Keith literally call Shiro a brother. Honestly to me it seems like fujo hypocrisy

So, nonnie, I’m only answering this once but my suggestion is to not come at me again with this anti nonsense because I legit cannot stand it and I will ignore and block it after this.  I have made my stances very well known on these sorts of subjects.  Besides the fact that you’re also asking me about she//ith on my AA blog, which I find incredibly frustrating. 

Also, apologies if this ends up in the cykes//quill tag; I know tumblr’s whole thing with word censoring can get obnoxious.

(I also find it funny that you’re comparing those two ships instead of justi//cykes and she//ith, which have a supposedly more comparable age gap…but I enjoy justi//cykes so I guess that wouldn’t fit your narrative, I suppose.)

(cut for length)

First of all, I personally do not ship cykes//quill but I could care less if other people do.  I’m not in the business of policing ships because I find ship policing to be a ridiculous waste of time and energy - once upon a time I allowed myself to get slightly sucked into that rhetoric for fear of having people be angry with me.  I hated feeling like that, especially since I felt like I was becoming more accepting of bullying tactics and I spent more time hating on things I disliked rather than enjoying the things I loved.  It wasn’t good for me.  I wanted to focus more on what I loved (with the occasional salt because I’m only human); isn’t that what fandom is supposed to be about?

The only thing that those two ships have in common is a supposed age gap, so I find it interesting that you chose to compare them (especially because the age gap isn’t really the reason I don’t ship Athena and Simon).  I say supposed, because the age discourse is all out of whack in Voltron - there are a ton of official sources saying different things, from the guidebook saying 25/18 to summaries of the show saying “five teenagers.”  Then of course there is the question of how long the garrison lasts: is it a college or more like graduate school?  Either way, I never saw Shiro as being 25; to me he was always around 21/22 when he finished at the garrison, making him more like Keith’s upperclassman.  But that’s besides the point; even at 18 and 25 I would ship them, because an age gap does not automatically equate to terrible elements in the ship.  Can it lead to it?  Sure, but that’s on a case-by-case basis and based on the people involved.   

Keith does not say that Shiro is literally a brother to him - he says he is like a brother to him, and this has never really impeded shipping or canon romance.  Take a look at Brooklyn Nine-Nine; in s1ep19 (Tactical Village), Jake tells Charles that Amy is like a sister.  By season 3, they are in a romantic relationship.  Now, season 5 (spoiler alert) they are engaged.  Similarly, in The Office, Pam remarks (I’m not sure what episode it is of the top of my head) at some point that Jim is like a brother to her.  They get married. 

My point is: saying someone is like a family member does not impede romance blossoming.  It could also be said simply because you’re trying to deny romantic feelings for fear of rejection or something else.  

I hate the fact that the ‘like a brother’ line, which is so deep for Shiro and Keith since Keith was orphaned and has feelings of abandonment and thus shows how deeply he cares about Shiro and how vital it is for Shiro to be with him, has been co-opted by antis to mean “these two are literal brothers.”  That is not what that line is, and using it to push that racist bro//ganes agenda is frustrating.  (I will not get into the racist overtones of bro//ganes; other people have explained it far better than I would be able to.) 

Shiro and Keith have a much different dynamic than Athena and Simon in my eyes and again, I kind of can’t believe that you would compare them.  Not because I like one and dislike the other, but because they are fundamentally two different things, even as romantic ships.  Simon and Athena have playful banter that involves basically poking fun of each other underscored with a lot of history - they know how much they care about each other, but he does insult her because that is how he is…but she gives it right back to him also.  In my experience, this is how siblings act, so that is how I see them.  Shiro and Keith do not have this at all.  They do not act in this manner - I can never see Keith nor Shiro really insulting the other even in that playful manner.  They are different characters than Athena and Simon; more serious in general compared to our panda and chickadee duo.  Keith and Shiro also share just…a ton of really tender and soft looks and moments, and Shiro is kind of like Keith’s trigger - when he is gone, Keith mourns him so intensely that he would have rather had no Voltron than accept that Shiro might not be returning.  He goes off the rails a bit, because Shiro is Keith’s “guiding light” according to Lauren Montgomery.  He gives up so much for Shiro, and Shiro trusts Keith more than anyone else as well. 

To me, Athena and Simon’s relationship isn’t built on their relationship so much as it is originally built on Simon’s devotion to Metis.  Not that Simon doesn’t love or care for Athena, but he specifically says that “…some things in this world are more important than your own life.”  When asked to clarify, he says “[M]y honor-bound duty to protect with my life…my mentor’s most beloved treasure.”  His ultimate reasoning for doing what he did relies on Metis rather than specifically Athena.  Again, this is not to say that he loves Athena any less; I just think that his devotion to Metis - his mentor and essentially his lord or master (since he identifies as a samurai) is what set him down that path.  

This is a big reason why I don’t really ship them.

(That and, yes, I find it personally squicky that he basically babysat her when she was a kid.  I know she grows up and is an adult in the present time stuff but that squick remains for me personally.)

So, yes, I will stop now even though I can easily continue, since I never really know if people will read something this lengthy anyway.  Where you interested in my actual reasoning or did you just want to say I had ‘fujo hypocrisy?’  Either way, there you go.  I imagine I did not convince you, but hopefully you’ll understand me more now

[justasocialmediastudent]

Is social media really bae?

Over the past few weeks, I have been talking about the identity crisis of Tumble, how social media relates to activism and political engagement. We all know that social media started off with the moto “to connect people worldwide”. Its reachability has been a great help in many ways to from communities and societies. It has linked millions and millions of individuals online and even brought some connections from online to offline. However, troll and social media conflicts exists. There is still this question: Is social media really bae?

Bae has been up to something all the time

Danah Boyd mentioned in the book called It’s Complicated:

Although  new forms of drama find a home through social media, teens’ behaviour have not significantly changed. Social media have not radically altered the dynamics of bullying, but it has made these dynamics more visible to more people. - Danah Boyd

Our bae did nothing wrong by existing and became the medium of trolling and social media conflicts. Trolling and other social media conflicts (or the Internet plague) are everywhere online. It spreads like a plague, disease and social media happens to be the medium. You wouldn’t blame the ship that carries disease-carry rats for the plague outbreak, right? I agree to what Danah Boyd said, especially how Internet makes the conflicts more obvious. Memories stay forever on the Internet, so does mistakes. No matter what you do, you just can’t undo whatever has been done online. This leads to a huge question: Why do people troll or involve in conflicts?

It’s all about ME!

Trollers love reactions from those who they trolled and bullies love to target those who are weak and powerless. The trollers and bullies have a sense of achievement or accomplishment after taking it all out on total strangers. This kind of behaviour is what people called narcissism.

Internet trolls are narcissists, psychopaths and sadists. - Dr. Golbeck

It’s all about themselves, the big word ME! They might have no reflections on their actions or might know that their actions are harmful towards others but hey, they can do it. No one would know. No one would care. It’s the INTERNET! The Internet then become the medium for them to spread this cyber plague. A case for this is the Tyler Clementi case. Tyler was ridiculed by his friends on Twitter after Tyler’s roommate recorded him kissing a boy in their room on his laptop web cam. This happened after he had come out. In the end, he jumped off the Washington Bridge. There is another case where a teenager called Hessay has committed suicide after receiving mean anonymous feedback from Sayat.Me.

I don’t know you, you don’t know me, so……

The concept of anonymity has been the idea of social media in connecting people and creating a safe space for everyone to voice their opinions. It was aimed to create a public sphere for everyone to take part in something without concerning their identity. There is this ideal “equality” for everyone online, but look at how it turns out. Trolling, bullying, harassments, and more ill-thoughts or ideology are being spread online. The idea of freedom of speech has been the shield for those who abuse it. The social media affords people to create fake identities online and start doing whatever they want to, including attacking people online.

Not long ago, when episode 14 of Darling in the Franxx aired, it causes the fandom to rage as the plot twist is unexpectedly different from the fans’ expectation. It leads to some fans string to use thrown-away twitter accounts to send death threats, curses, and harassments to the producer’s tweets.

I don’t belong here

The sense of belonging also plays an important role in social media users behavior online. Most people went online to seek for connection with people, they want to build their own social circle that they feel they belong to. It’s all good when the people connects with one another in a community that are sharing the same hobbies or interests. However, it also forms societies where ideologies and information are being spread from communities to communities. For instance, a person may be inside of a community that loves pets, this person may also be inside a community that pro-guns. Imagine this kind of relationship where each person are in different communities as they have different interest and beliefs, the transmission of information will happen when they start sharing information from each of their own communities. It spreads like a ripple effect. Here are some examples of unhealthy or rather dangerous ideologies that exists online:

Pro-suicide : It’s not that long ago since the Blue Whale challenge came out, “preparing” or encourages teenagers to suicide in order to “become a whale”. It consists of 50 tasks over the span of 50 days which include mutilation, carving blue whale and watch horror or gory videos.There are posts on Tumblr that encourages suicide. Some are even forcing people to suicide.

Thinpo : I believe a lot of people has discovered the dark side of Tumblr that Tumblr is now trying to get rid of. Thinpo came from the word “thinspiration”. There are a huge community online that supports thinpo which also relates to eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Majority of the people who supports thinpo would be also in the pro-ana community, where they believe that being thin to the bone and boney figures are attractive. However, they just cannot see that their health is declining and their bodies are slowing dying because of the unhealthy practices. For them, it hurts more to look in the mirror and to being called “fat”. Thinpo can be often found on blogs and Tumblr where they would write blogs about their tips on achieving the boney figure through excessive or extreme dieting or practices.

The two ideologies mentioned above are spread using hashtags, such as #Iamawhale, #proana and #thinpo. The social media affords exposure and findability through the hashtags function but the fact that it also affords unhealthy ideologies to be spreading is also an issue.

Save them, save us

Now most of the social media have revised their community guidelines to prevent these kind of communities online. Does social media governance work? Well, I think it can restrict the access and minimize the spreading of cyber plague but not totally killing it. People will still find ways to get around any restriction or rules. I have seen some blogs that have taken down, came back with a new blog but with secret messages hidden in it, still convey the messages that broke the community guidelines. Bots can only block certain words but not hidden meanings. I think that social media classes should be given to parents and students at young age, so they would understand how Internet works in order to face and handle social media conflicts and trolling the best way.

Social media is love, social media is life

In my opinion, the Actor Network theory can be applied here as social media is a tool used to connect with people, and people are the ones that created social media. Human and this piece of technology are influencing each other. This can also be related to grassroots ‘bystander’ activism, where activism happened because human made social media a medium to spread the awareness or issues, but social media also affords human to be able to connect and form communities and societies. An example of this will be the #MarchForOurLives campaign.

References

Chin, B n.d., ‘ Week 7 Digital Citizenship 3: Trolling & social media conflict ’, MDA20009 Digital Communites , Learning materials on Blackboard, Swinburne University Sarawak, 16 April 2018, viewed 16 April 2018.